rious palaces with all the noblest tributes of art that she could bring from subject-lands, a power that had its birth-place in Jerusalem was advancing in the first centuries of the Christian era, which was destined to discard the fables of heathen mythology, and depose the heroes of ancient worship: CHRISTIANITY came, with its own legends and its austere symbols, and proclaimed heroes superior to them all; and Rome herself was destined to yield to the conquerors who came in the Redeemer's might. But Christianity asked no aid from the fine arts of heathen nations; and in the catacombs, amid the most solemn inspirations the world has known, the confessors of Christ celebrated in gloom and persecution the mysteries of their faith. Long ages were to elapse before the Church of the true God was to be set on high among the people, and was to bid art revive, and become thenceforth consecrated to His service. On the rude walls of subterranean caverns, and above the tombs of martyrs, the first Christian artists traced works which they hoped would remain the lasting memorials of a superhuman faith and fervour: the pictured formularies of human lives and hopes, which Poetry came not to celebrate, nor History to preserve. When Christianity triumphed, the Muses met no encouragement from the anti-pagan zeal of the Christians. They are said to have put ropes round the necks of many a marble Venus and Apollo, to have tried them publicly like criminals, found them guilty of heathenism and beauty, and pounded them to dust. One cannot think without lively indignation of the similar scenes that were enacted in our country more than twelve hundred years afterwards, when the Puritans and Reformers raged with the fury of iconoclasm, and rose to outrage and deface the solemn temples of God in which they had just before worshipped. Then, after the downfall of the Roman Empire, and the irruption in Italy of barbarous nations-enemies alike to Christianity and to classic art-even civilisation underwent eclipse. Amid the ruins of Rome and other cities of Italy, the Church alone preserved ancient learning, and alone afforded a sanctuary to those arts which were conducive to her service; but the rigid forms and materials of the Christian art of those days gave little scope to genius, nor did Architecture yet afford a theatre for its encouragement; still, neither Music nor Painting seem to have wholly fled the land. When, however, the Christian faith was acknowledged throughout the Roman Empire, a second period of the development of Christian art began; and, instead of the allegorical forms in which she had symbolised her faith in the ages of persecution, the Church could now represent images of beatitude and triumph, and place the figure of her Lord in a pre-eminent majesty as the Light of the World. The accession of Charlemagne gave a new impulse to the Fine Arts throughout the whole Empire of the West: the mission of inspecting the churches and paintings formed part of the functions of the royal envoys. Italian art had before this time found its way to England, where the lamp of learning shone brightly from this remote diocese of Christendom. To the union of Poetry and Music, and the cultivation, to some degree, of both in our own country, even in the remote times of the Saxon Heptarchy when society was in a disturbed and an almost barbarous state, full testimony remains; and (as Mitford remarks) it is a curious coincidence, that in so widely distant an age as the reign of our great Alfred, and in this remote home of civilisation, Poetry and Music should have been united much in the same way as they were in ancient Greece. But some centuries that passed after the time of Charlemagne are illumined by no rays of genius in the southern lands where the Muses had formerly breathed inspiration upon their votaries. At length the silver-winged messengers appeared: a new light and spirit moved upon the face of the earth. Art, like the Dardan wanderer, had found the golden bough, and, led by Religion among the saintly forms of holiness, devoutly aspired to find the abode of the heavenly Father. In Italy, the latter half of the thirteenth century—that is to say, a period contemporary with our Edward the First--is illustrated in Poetry with the grand and solitary name of Dante, and in Painting with the name of Cimabue, who was its reviver and regenerator in Italy, and who, like the graceful and expressive Giotto, his successor, shone as an isolated light in the longdarkened world of medieval art. It was not long before the time of Cimabue that modern Architecture freed itself from the classic yoke; and it is gratifying to our national pride that we D are able to trace that change in Italy to the influence of the English style of Gothic Architecture. If it was from Italy that the Fine Arts first came into England (and I need not here narrate what the Anglo-Saxon Church owed to Rome for the Romanesque architecture, the music, and the art of illuminating manuscripts which she successfully cultivated from the time that the venerable Abbat Benedict brought the productions of distant lands to adorn his great monasteries of Jarrow and Wearmouth); if, I say, it was from Italy that Art was transplanted to our country, it was from England that Gothic Architecture was introduced into Italy. To Cardinal Guala, a potential legate known in English affairs of state in the last years of the reign of King John, that introduction has been ascribed. And an Englishman may also reflect with pride that Painting was successfully practised in England (though, perhaps, only in the service of Architecture) contemporaneously with the restoration of the art of Painting by Cimabue in Italy. The magnificent monuments of architectural skill and splendour that were erected from the time of the Conquest to the close of the thirteenth century afforded abundant scope for the employment of architects, sculptors, and painters. Henry the Third at least deserves this praise that he was the first English sovereign who paid attention to those arts; and by him, as by Edward the First, their professors appear to have been liberally employed. The reigns of the Plantagenets were indeed a glorious epoch for art; they wrote the narratives of Scripture-history (as somebody has well said) on vast illuminated leaves of glass; their monumental memorials are a style of sculpture unsurpassed in any age or country of Europe; and the rising commercial greatness of England fostered the arts without degrading them, and enriched our land with forms of grace and beauty. But in mediæval times neither Sculpture nor Painting attained in England a development equal to that of Architecture. The Pointed style-at once original and Christian-unadulterated by those associations of heathenism which infect the walls of every antique edifice, seems to have been created for a new and purer faith; and it spread rapidly and simultaneously over the chief part of Christendom, but in no country attained more character istic purity, majesty, and grace than in Great Britain. Its rapid naturalisation and its luxuriant development have been attributed to its fitness to give expression to our faith, our love and hope. Gothic Architecture (as a gifted writer well observes) creeps not along the ground like the horizontal line of the pagan temple, nor the low-roofed mosque of the Moslem, but aspires as with the prayers of worshippers. Greatness, massiveness, and sublimity were felt to be needful elements for the material temple of the Eternal: in vastness and altitude the architects of old sought utterance; their vaulted roofs conveyed the impression of sublimity; their clustered pillars were full of symbolic expression; and their vast dimensions and shadowy aisles set forth the Christian's sense of the greatness and unsearchable presence of God: While far away, and high above, In maze on maze the trancéd sight And how perfect is this Christian style! how harmonious in its proportions! how inexhaustible in its resources and varieties of combination, how full of meaning and capability! how significant its cruciform plan, its aspiring pinnacles! how pervading the religious sentiment, how true the artistic poetry and feeling! how satisfying to the eye, how eloquent to the sympathetic heart! But if in medieval times neither Sculpture nor Painting attained in England a development equal to that of Architecture, I fear that in Architecture and Monumental Sculpture our own age will not bear comparison with the thirteenth century; and truly, in the application of painting and colour to our churches and palaces, we might advantageously take a lesson from the times that bigotry calls "the dark ages." In Church Architecture we have not yet emerged from the carpenter's Gothic of the time of George III.; and whereas the thirteenth century saw the noblest abbey churches built, the nineteenth century sees them still lying in lonely and desolate ruin, as if they were no more to us than the Irish round towers-those slender, cone-topped piles that, upon bleak hill-sides or by a gloomy lake, stand in such mysterious and ghost-like grandeur, surrounded by the ruins of a thousand years. The monumental sculpture with which the false taste and perverted art of the last three hundred years have encumbered our edifices of religion is unworthy even of heathen art, and has for the most part nothing Christian in its character. Even in the third century, Christian subjects were represented in the sculptured forms of Roman art; but our modern monuments are generally mere petrifactions of heathenism, unredeemed by the grace which classic Sculpture could boast, and destitute of its poetry and fitness. Westminster abbey and St. Paul's cathedral are crowded with "the marble offspring of allegory," speaking a language unknown to the people, and unsuited to the place. In St. Paul's cathedral somebody reckoned up nine Britannias, six Fames, fifteen Victories, seventeen Neptunes, and one Minerva, besides a crowd of river gods of every kind, varied with what have been facetiously called "fricasees of flying angels;" winged and chubby boys-those spiritualised cherubim which are formed of an infant's head with a pair of duck's wings under the chin; troopers in jack-boots, and solemn statesmen in copious wigs-all undeniably Georgian in their type. Again, what can be a more abject perversion of the powers of Sculpture than to apply it (as it has been applied in several of the modern monuments in Westminster abbey and St. Paul's,) to impalpable objects, such as clouds and sunbeams? Then, as regards the application of fresco and coloured decoration to our edifices, we are not less behind the days of the Plantagenets. An unvaried coldness of stone surface was unknown in England in the middle. ages, as it was in the best periods of antiquity. Great works in fresco enlivened the halls of kings and the Houses of God; and even beneath the northern skies gold and colour glowed in our cathedrals. But I was speaking of the revival of Art in Europe in the thirteenth century. At that epoch, Art attained a wondrous unity. The studio of the painter became transformed (as it were) into an oratory; and Art-ever embracing a divine. theme with ardour-brought the noblest productions of genius to the altar. Painting became peculiarly the handmaid of |