The very interesting collection of oil paintings, drawings and etchings formed by the late Constantine Alexander Ionides, one of England's wealthy Greek residents, is to, be seen at South Kensington. A small collection representing the good taste of one humane connoisseur offers perhaps the perfect conditions to the lover of art : and these we have in the Ionides Bequest. A visitor to London bent upon the study of Rembrandt's etchings would go naturally to the Print Room of the British Museum ; but they have there no better impressions than some that Mr. Ionides brought together. Mr. Ionides' interest in etching extended to modern masters too here are Whistler and Legros, Strang and Rodin. Particularly here is Millet, with his "Gleaners," his "Shepherdess Knitting," and other examples of simplicity and sincerity and power. And though the locus classicus for Flaxman is University College in Gower Street, the Ionides' Flax-mans should be asked for particularly, and also his collection of drawings by Alphonse Legros, one of the most illustrious of our French adopted sons, whose home was in England for many years. Here also are drawings by that great master Henri Daumier, too little of whose work is accessible to the English picture lover : thirteen in all, of which the "Wayside Railway Station" is perhaps the greatest, and "The Print Collector," which it is amusing to compare with Meissonier's at the Wallace Collection, the most finished. Another fascinating drawing is a sketch of Antwerp by Hervier, a French artist of much accomplishment and charm who is also too little known in England.

The best paintings in the Ionides Collections are in Room XCI, where many beautiful Barbizon pictures are to be seen. Among the others is a fine Bonington, with a glimpse of a boat sailing on the Lake of Geneva seen through a doorway. Guardi, whom we saw to such advantage at the Wallace Collection, has here a decorative treatment of a fair in the Piazza of St. Mark at Venice,with a sky above it of profound blue. One of the most charming of the old Dutch pictures is a landscape by Philip de Koninck; while of the new Dutch examples there is a beautiful little hay wagon by Matthew Maris. The brothers Antoine and Louis Le Nain, of whom very few examples are to be found in England, have two pictures here, very curious and modern. Corot is not quite at his best in either of his two pictures, although both are beautiful, but Courbet's "Immensite" (No. 59) sea and sand at sunset is fine. Diaz's "Baigneuse" (No. 60) is as he alone could have painted it, and Georges Michel, another French painter whose appearance on English walls is too infrequent, has a beautiful "Mill" (No. 67) that might have been derived direct from Constable and Linnell, yet is individual too. Millet's great picture here, "The Wood Sawyers" (No. 47), I do not much like: it has the air of being painted to be sold; but the other three are very interesting, especially perhaps the "Landscape" (No. 172) in the manner of Corot. Rousseau's spreading Fontainebleau tree (No. 54) is perhaps the flower of the Barbizon contribution.

The Natural History Museum, the great building to the west, in the Cromwell Road, is a museum in the fullest sense of the word: almost everything in it is stuffed. But its interest cannot be exaggerated. Life was never so tactfully, prettily and successfully counterfeited as it is in the galleries on the ground floor, just to the left of the entrance, which contain the cases of British birds with their nests. It needs no learning in ornithology, no scientific taste, to appreciate these beautiful cases, where everything that can be done has been done to ensure realism even to the sawing down of a tree to obtain a titmouse's nest in one of its branches. Here you may see how sand martins arrange their colonies, and here peep into the nest of the swallows beneath the eaves ; but as to whether Sir James Barrie is right in thinking that they build there in order to hear fairy stories, or Hans Andersen is right in holding that their intention is to tell them, the catalogue says nothing. The Museum takes all nature for its province from whales to humming birds, a case of which occurs charmingly at every turn : from extinct mammoths to gnats, which it enlarges in wax twenty-eight times to the size of a creature in one of Mr. Wells' terrible books in order that the student may make no mistake.

CANNON STREET STATION FROM THE RIVER

Perhaps the most interesting gallery in the whole building is that on the third floor devoted to men and apes, which illustrates not only the Darwinian theory (there is a statue of Darwin on the stairs) but also the indecency of science, for surely it is something worse than bad manners thus to expose the skulls of gentlemen and monkeys. The gentlemen it is true are for the most part foreigners and heathen; but none the less I came away with a disagreeable feeling that the godhead had been tarnished. The most interesting single case in the Museum is perhaps that in the great hall illustrating "Mimicry," where you may see butterflies so like leaves that you do not see them : caterpillars like twigs : and moths like lichen. Between these and the extinct monster, the Diplodocus-Carnegii which is almost as long as the Cromwell Road itself and seems to have been equally compounded of giraffe, elephant and crocodile, all stretched to breaking point one can acquire, in the Natural History Museum, some faint idea of the resource, ingenuity and insoluble purposes of life.