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84 THE COURANT; A SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL.
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such as hers. She was my pupil. A teacher's honest
pride will not allow me to withhold the fact. Was ever
teacher so rewarded, 'the pupil become the intellectual
model, the exemplar,' the teacher drinking large draughts
of inspiration and refreshment from the stream she
had taught to flow. O, when a small rivulet she
disencumbered it from the weeds and roots that
had choked up its source, and removed the sand
and drift-wood that had impeded its onward career,
little did she deem that one day its broad waters
would bear on their bosom more than the wealth of
Ind. Little does the teacher imagine oft, the price-
less value of the gem, which, as a cunning lapidary, he
is to cut and polish, the preciousness of the diamond
upon which he is to engrave sentiments, lasting as eter-
nity. Such gem, such diamond was "Lizzie Clarendon.
As her life had been beautiful, so its end was glorious.
Her dying eyes were allowed a Pisgah view of the new
Jerusalem, that city of her God, henceforth to be her
enduring habitation. With a countenance already lighted
up with rays from the glory to be revealed, with ears
attuned to the rustle of the angel wings, with the
words on her lips--"I have talked of Heaven, I have
sung of Heaven, I have written of Heaven; but, O,
until now, how little did I know of its real beauty and
joy! Heaven, sweet Heaven! almost home!"--she
passed away, to the peace and blessedness of a clime
more congenial to her than this.
A WAIL FOR THE GIFTED.
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A wail for the gifted, the gifted, the good,
O, the tide of our grief swelleth high as a flood,
And its wild beating surges seem ever to moan
The wreck of our fond hopes, our gited one gone.

We mourn thee, we mourn thee, our gifted our good.
'Tis due to thy genius and worth that we should,
Even while well assured that on bright burnish'd wing
Our Song-bird hath gone with the angels to sing.

It was meet, she on soaring, bright pinions should rise.
Untarnish'd, unsoil'd, early up to the skies,
Like a lark in the morning that upward doth go,
While its song cheers the hearts of the dwellers below.

And though she hath taken Empyrean flight,
She hath left for us here a sweet song of delight,
If attuned be our hearts to the heavenly strain,
For us she hath lived, and hath died not in vain.
Columbia, S. C.
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THE EXHIBITION OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
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Looking, a second time, over the many critical notices
of our Metropolitan picture-show, concerning which our
extracts last week were somewhat lengthy, we cannot
find much more that would interest the general reader.
Still, it would be wrong to omit Mr. Ruskin's comments
on his quondam friend, Millais, albeit, this artist has
been pretty well dissected; you need not fear a rehash
of any other critic's views, when you read John Ruskin.
Thus does he discourse, in a recently published pamphlet
on the several London exhibitions of the season, touch-
ing The Vale of Rest:
"I have no doubt the beholder is considerably offended
at first sight of this picture--justifiably so, considering
what might once have been hoped for from its painter:
but unjustifiably, if the offence taken prevents his stay-
ing by it; for it deserves his study. 'We are offended
by it.' Granted. Perhaps the painter did not mean
us to be pleased. It may be that he supposed we should
have been offended if we had seen the real nun digging
her real grave; that she and it might have appeared to
us not altogether pathetic, romantic, or sublime; but only
strange, or horrible; and that he chooses to fasten this
sensation upon us rather than any other.
"It is a temper into which many a good painter has
fallen before now. You would not find it a pleasant
thing to be left at twilight in the church of the Madon-
na of the garden at Venice, with the last light falling
on the skeletons--half alive, dreamy, stammering skele-
tons--shaking the dust off their ribs, in Tintoret's Last
Judgment. Perhaps even you might not be at your
ease before one or two pale crucifixes, which I remember
of Giotto's and other not mean men, where the dark red
runlets twine and trickle from the feet down to the skull
at the root of the cross. Many an ugly spectre and
ghastly face has been painted by the glooomier German
workmen before now, and been in some sort approved by
us; nay, there is more horror by far, of a certain kind,
in modern French works--Vernet's Eylau and Plague,
and such like--which we do not hear any one declaim
against--(nay, which seem to meet a large division of
public taste,) than in this picture which so many people
call 'frightful,'
"Why so frightful? Is it not because it is so nearly
beautiful? Because the dark green field, and windless
trees, and purple sky might be so lovely to persons un-
concerned about their graves?
"Or is it that the faces are so ugly? You would
have liked them better to be fair faces, such as would
grace a drawing-room, and the grave to be dug in pret-
tier ground--under a rose-bush or willow, and in turf,
set with violets--nothing like a bone visible as one
threw the mould out. So, it would have been a sweet
piece of convent sentiment.
"I am afraid that it is a good deal more like real con-
vent sentiment as it is. Death--confessed for king be-
fore his time--asserts, so far as I have seen, some author-
ity over such places; either unperceived, and then the
worst, in drowsy unquickening of the soul; or felt, and
terrible, pouring out his white ashes upon the heart--
ashes that burn with cold. If you think what the kind
of persons who have strength of conviction enough to
give up the world, might have done for the world had
they not given it up; and how the King of Terror must
rejoice when he wins for himsel another soul that might
have gone forth to calm the earth; and folds his white
wings over it forever--he also gathering his children to-
gether; and how those white sarcophagi--towered and
belfried, each with his companies of living dead, gleam
still so multitudinous among the mountain pyramids of
the fairest countries of the earth; places of silence for
their sweet voices; places of binding for the faithfullest
hands; places of fading for their mightiest intelligence;
you may, perhaps, feel also, that so great wrong cannot
be lovely in the near aspect of it; and that if this very
day, at evening, we were allowed to see what the last
clouds of twilight glow upon in some convent garden of
the Apennines, we might leave the place with some such
horror as this picture will leave upon us; not all of it
noble horror, but in some sort repulsive and ignoble.
"It is, for these reasons to me, a great work; never-
theless, part of its power is not to the painter's praise.
The crude painting is here in a kind of harmony with
the expression of discord which was needed. But it is
crude--not in momentary compliance with the mood
which prompted this wild design; but in apparent con-
sistency of decline from the artist's earlier ways of la-
bour. Pass to his other picture--the Spring, and we
find the colour not less abrupt, though more vivid.
"And when we look at this fierce and rigid orchard--
this angry blooming, petals, as it were, of japanned
brass; and remember the lovely wild roses and flowers
scattered on the stream in the Ophelia; there is, I re-
gret to say, no ground for any diminution of the doubt
which I expressed two years since, respecting the future
career of a painter who can fall thus strangely beneath
himself.
"The power has not yet left him. With all its faults,
and they are grievous, this is still mighty painting;
nothing else is as strong, or approximately as strong,
within these walls. But it is a phenomenon, so far as I
know, unparalleled hitherto in art-history, that any
workman capable of so much should rest content with so
little. All former art, by men of any intellect, has been
wrought, under whatever limitations of time, as well as
the painter could do it; evidently with an effort to reach
something beyond what was actually done; if a sketch,
the sketch showed a straining towards completion; if a
picture, it showed a straining to a higher perfection;
but here, we have a careless and insolent indication of
things that might be--not the splendid promise of a
grand impatience, but the scrabbled remnant of a scorn-
fully abandoned aim.
"And this wildness of execution is strangely associa-
ted with the distortion of feature which more or less has
been sought for by this painter from his earliest youth;
just as it was by Martin Schonganer and Mantegna. In
the first picture (from Keat's Isabella) which attracted
public attention, the figure in the foreground writhed in
violence of constrained rage; in the picture of the Holy
Family at Nazareth, the Virgin's features were contort-
ed in sorrow over a wounded hand; violent ugliness of
feature spoiled a beautiful arrangement of colour in the
Return of the Dove, and disturbed a powerful piece of
dramatic effect in the Escape from the Inquisition. And
in this present picture, the unsightliness of some of the
faces, and the preternatural grimness of others, with the
fierce colour and angular masses of the flowers above,
force upon me a strange impression, which I cannot
shake off--that this is an illustration of the song of
some modern Dante, who, at the first entrance of an in-
ferno for English society, had found, carpeted with
ghostly grass, a field of penance for young ladies; where
girl-blossoms, who had been vainly gay, or treacherously
amiable, were condemned to recline in reprobation un-
der red-hot apple blossom, and sip scalding milk out of
a poisoned porringer."
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ALLEGED COPY OF THE SENTENCE PASSED
ON THE SAVIOUR.
-----
Can any of your correspondents inform me whether
the inclosed extract from the Kolnische Zeitung is based
on sound authority, and what that authority is? Also,
when and where was this Kolnische Zeitung published?

CORRECT TRANSCRIPT OF THE SENTENCE OF DEATH
PRONOUNCED AGAINST JESUS CHRIST.
The following is a copy of the memorable judicial
sentence which has ever been pronounced in the annals
of the world--namely, that of death against the Savi-
our, with the remarks which the journal Le Droit has
collected, and the knowledge of which must be interest-
ing in the highest degree to every Christian. Until now
I am not aware that it has ever been made public in the
German papers. The sentence is word for word as fol-
lows:

Sentence pronounced by Pontius Pilate, intendant of
the province of Lower Galilee, that Jesus of Nazareth
shall suffer death by the cross.
In the seventeenth year of the reign of the Empe-
ror Tiberius, and on the 25th day of the month of March,
in the most holy city of Jerusalem, during the pontifi-
cate of Annas and Caiaphas.
Pontius Pilate, intendant of the province of Lower
Galilee, sitting in judgment in the presidential seat of
the prætor, sentences Jesus of Nazareth to death on a
cross, between two robbers, as the numerous and noto-
rious testimonies of the people prove:
1. Jesus is a misleader.
2. He has excited the people to sedition.
3. He is an enemy to the laws.
4. He calls himself the Son of God.
5. He calls himself falsely, the King of Israel.
6. He went into the Temple, followed by a multitude
carrying palms in their hands.
Orders the first centurion, Quirilius Cornelius, to
bring him to the place of execution.
Forbids all persons, rich or poor, to prevent the exe-
cution of Jesus.
The witnesses who have signed the excution of Jesus
are:
1. Daniel Robani, Pharisee.
2. John Zorobabel.
3. Raphael Robani.
4. Capet.
Jesus to be taken out of Jerusalem through the gate
of Tournea.

This sentence is engraved on a plate of brass, in the
Hebrew language, and on its sides are the following
words: "A similar plate has been sent to each tribe."
It was discovered in the year 1280, in the city of Aquila,
in the kingdom of Naples, by a search made for the dis-
covery of Roman antiquities, and remained there until
it was found by the commissaries of art in the French
army of Italy. Up to the time of the war in Southern
Italy, it was preserved in the sacristy of the Carthusians,
near Naples, where it was kept in a box of ebony.--
Since then the relic has been kept in the chapel of
Caserta. The Carthusians obtained by their petitions
that the plate might be kept by them, which was an
acknowledgment of the sacrifices which they made for
the French army. The French translation was made
literally by members of the commission of art. Denon
had a fac-simile of the plate engraved, which was
bought by Lord Howard, on the sale of his cabinet, for
2,890 francs. There seems to be no historical doubt as to
the authenticity of this. The reasons of the sentence
correspond exactly with those of the Gospel--From
Notes and Queries.--Translated from the Kolnische
Zeitung.
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ANECDOTE OF STUART.--Mr. C. of this city tells a
good story of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, which illus-
trates finely the power a secret has to propogate itself,
if once allowed a little airing and reach a few ears.
Stuart had, as he supposed, discovered a secret art of
coloring, very valuable. He told it to a friend. His
friend valued it highly, and came a time afterwards to
ask permission to communicate it under oath of eternal
secrecy to a friend of his who needed every possible aid
to enable him to rise.
"Let me see," said Stuart, making a chalk mark on a
board near by, "I know this art, and that is --
"One," said his friend.
"You know it," continued Stuart, making another
mark by the side of the one already made, "and that is---
"Two," cried the other.
"Well, and I tell your friend, and that will be"--
making a third mark.
"Three only," said the other.
"No," said Stuart, "It's one hundred and eleven!"
(111.)--Newport Mercury.
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