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and fancy which are still such predominant qualities in the sister Isle. But, on the other hand, it is equally characteristic of ourselves that we showed a less rigid superstition in the adherence to Byzantine types and traditions. Our figures, it appears, could, at a very early period, stand on their feet, and also sometimes move, which was an immense achievement. A decided tendency to dramatic sentiment is observed in the most ancient Anglo-Saxon miniatures, dating as far back as the 7th century, and also the germ of those two opposite qualities peculiar to our art and poetry, the fantastic in conception and the realistic in execution. This reality is seen in a more earnest expression of the feelings. A certain affectionateness of manner-apparent of course almost exclusively in the more loving relation between the Virgin and Child-tells of English domestic habits not entirely forgotten in the monastery; while the subject of the' murder of the Innocents, is nowhere so early given, with so painful a truth as in English miniatures. Throughout the fluctuations which befel the school, which rose and fell with the vicissitudes of the land, these characteristics may be considered as permanent, while the abundance of fun and drolleries which fill the borders, in which the church is never spared, show the national impudence and the freedom it enjoyed-always healthy signs-to be perpetually on the increase. It was merry England indeed in her old miniatures-a shorter step from the sublime to the ridiculous than could be found elsewhere-things sacred and things absurd (not profane) put in the closest juxtaposition. Many a page reminds us of a schoolboy's exercise-the set task, whatever it might be, done soberly enough in the middle, and the margins scrawled over with all sorts of harumscarum inventions. For instance, the Coronation of the Virgin is seen above, and on one side a fox, with a bishop's mitre and staff, preaching to four geese-David gravely playing on the Psaltery, and, round an initial in the border, an ass playing the lute, a monkey the violin, and a hare striking the cymbals-the three Kings appearing before Herod, and tournaments below, some figures with animals' heads, some without legs, tumbling off their horses, much in the style of a Christmas pantomime-or, on other occasions, grotesque animals racing and chasing each other with all kinds of frolic impertinence, like the monkeys in the Zoological Gardens. In some instances the freak is introduced into the picture itself. Who but a mad-cap Englishman of the dark ages would have represented the daughter of Herodias making millsails, by way of dancing, before Herod? The reign of Chivalry too is abundantly delineated in these works, and Cervantes admirably illustrated ages before he appeared. Also true English

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sports and pastimes appear-wrestling and falcon flying, and even a cock-fight, which Dr. Waagen gravely opines to be one of the oldest representations of such a subject-the MS. in which it appears being about the date 1320. It is worthy of remark that the representations of animals are far better and truer to nature than in the contemporary miniatures of other nations. Then, as regards the purely mechanical part, we are famed for beauty and brilliancy of colours, and for great precision and neatness of execution—indications, if not in an æsthetic, yet in a practical sense, of a people who, as the phrase goes, turn out a better article in mere manufacturing respects than most of their rivals. Nor does it appear that when the English had fair play they betrayed any incapacity for the higher elements of pictorial art; on the contrary, the support which art received in this country during the reign of Henry III. and the three Edwards, has left its fruits in English miniatures which, we are assured, excel those of all other nations of the same time, with the exception of the Italian, and are not inferior even to them.

It would take too long to pursue the subject of native art in all its hindrances and developments. Dr. Waagen gives so admirable a summary of them, and of the political causes which nipped our talents in one respect and fostered them in another, in his Chapter on the Vernon Gallery, that we cannot do better than transcribe it:

This is a suitable occasion for inquiring into the reasons why the real school of painting and sculpture arose so late in England as compared with other nations, and also why it developed those peculiarities which distinguish it from other schools. I have already shown, in my observations on English miniatures-with which, be it remarked, some larger pictures still preserved correspond-that the English, up to the middle of the fifteenth century, had developed a certain degree of originality in painting, while many works in their Gothic ecclesiastical buildings testify the same in the department of sculpture. I have pointed out that in the wars of the Houses of York and Lancaster may be traced the chief interruption to the further progress of native art, which then gave place to an imitation of Netherlandish art, at that period in the most flourishing state of development, and which, in its realistic tendency, coincided the more with the foregone English school. But when once an original and indigenous mode of art is supplanted by a foreign style of superior development, it becomes doubly difficult to revive it, and in this case the difficulty was increased by the number of excellent Netherlandish artists who continued to flourish in England under English patronage: so great a genius as Holbein under Henry VIII.; so able a portrait-painter as Sir Anthony More under Queen Mary; and a whole succession under Elizabeth and James I. How was it possible that the long-discouraged native art should contend against such agencies as these? Thus, if it be clear that the great

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and original talents for art, of which the English gave such ample proof, were by this means hindered in that further and riper development which took place in the sixteenth century so conspicuously among the Italians, and next to them among the Germans, Netherlanders, and French, it is no less true that the national feeling for art found vent in that form of which language is the expression-namely, in the richest emanations of poetry. This sister art is, from various reasons, less affected by political disturbances or public calamities, and less dependent on external support. She does not require expensive mechanical aids, nor by any means the same outward encouragement; nor is the maintenance of a school, in the strict sense of the word, with all its personal and living traditions, and its scientific and technical endowments and advantages, necessary as a condition of existence to the art of poetry, though indispensable to the other arts. Hence we find the original tendency of English poetry, as it showed itself in Chaucer in the fourteenth century, continuing in the sixteenth century in Spenser, and attaining its fullest development in Shakspeare. This great genius presented to us, as in a magic mirror, the romantic spirit of the middle ages, just when that period had come to an end; while he became the founder of a new epoch in poetry, of which profound thought, bitter irony, and intellectual humour are the chief elements. Precisely in this Janus-like, double character-embodying a great past and divulging a pregnant future-lies the true and undying significance of Shakspeare, and the wondrous spell he exercises, and ever will exercise, over every impressionable heart, while any feeling for the great, the noble, and the beautiful exists. In this great man, therefore, the national genius for art found its golden age. He was to the English what the cinquecento age was to the Italians. Whether the formative arts would have attained to such an elevated rank in England as they did in Italy and the Netherlands it is impossible to say, but I am convinced that considerable originality and excellence would have been developed. That no original English art, however, should have been developed in the seventeenth century-a time which saw a second rich harvest of painting in the Netherlands, an important period of art in France, and a considerable revival at all events in Italy-that even this century should have done nothing for England, is a fact for which I think sufficient reasons may be alleged. Although so distinguished a foreign artist as Vandyck enjoyed the chief English patronage under the protection of the art-loving King Charles I., yet such valuable masters as Old Stone and Dobson, as well as the admirable miniature-painters Isaac and Peter Oliver, although they attached themselves to the manner of that great painter, testify the existence of very considerable native powers, from which an original school of English art would doubtless have sprung, had not the reign of Puritanism under Cromwell intervened. If that dark, narrow, and joyless spirit, inimical to every species of art, interrupted even the feeling for the drama, so deeply rooted in the English, and so highly cultivated from the time of Shakspeare, how should the struggling germ of the formative arts be expected to have survived? By the time of the Restoration, in 1660, the English

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had assumed quite a different character. We no longer find them the same joyous, cheerful, and poetic people, who delighted in innocent games and jubilees, and whom Shakspeare had so spiritedly described to us, but we find them rather a narrow, serious, reflective, and prosaic nation. To this was now added that element of frivolity imported by Charles II. from France, an element not only quite foreign to the English character, but destructive to all real feeling for art, and which, favoured by the Court, influenced also the literature of the day. From this combination arose a spirit of rationalism and scepticism, and a narrow-minded system of education, which was in the highest degree pernicious to that fancy with which the artist has most to do. These unfavourable agencies show themselves largely in the works of English poets of that time, of whom I will only particularise Swift-who excelled in that form of verse which nearest approaches prose, namely, in satire-and Pope, the representative of the French esprits." This was not the atmosphere in which any native art could expand, therefore we need not wonder that the chief patronage of art should have been engrossed by foreigners,-by Sir Peter Lely and Sir Godfrey Kneller as portrait painters, and by Verrio the Neapolitan and Charles de la Fosse as executants of that insipid and flimsy form of historical painting which was still in request in the palaces of the great. With the confirmed stability of the House of Hanover under George II., the power and political consequence of England became greatly augmented. Private wealth increased, and a sense of peace and security returned, to which the national mind had long been a stranger. A natural consequence of this was a reaction in art and literature, in which that combination of reality and humour, indigenous to the English character, once again appeared on the stage, and took that form which suited the spirit of the times. In literature this reaction was achieved by such men as Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, in whom sentimentality was an additional feature; and in art by Hogarth, who, to a realistic and humorous tendency, added a moral aim in his pictures. But it required all the extraordinary talent and energy of Hogarth's character to assert and maintain this totally new tendency against that cold and affectedly ideal form of art which still prevailed. He was 53 years of age before his six pictures of the Mariage à la Mode, which he then sold by public auction, found a purchaser; nor did they realise more than the paltry sum of 110 guineas. The realistic school was now taken up by Reynolds and Gainsborough, while the more idealising tendency of the landscape painter Wilson, which, in its beautiful forms borrowed from Italian nature, and in all its poetic subjects taken from Greek mythology, has a certain affinity to Claude, found so little favour with the English that it was difficult for him to dispose of his pictures even at the lowest prices. Nor did Barry, who pursued much the same tendency, fare better. Not till Flaxman, the great sculptor, appeared, endowed as he was with the richest powers of invention, and a rare feeling for beauty of form and grace of movement, did this tendency find any favour with the public, and then not in the degree which his exalted

merit deserved. Greater success attended the efforts of Stothard, who, with his versatility of talent, combined both the realistic and ideal tendencies, and whose productiveness continued into an advanced age. As the transmission, however, of correct technical principles, which in the painting schools of the middle ages had been perpetuated from generation to generation, had, with the extinction of the early English school, long been lost, the new school was compelled in this, as in every other respect, to evolve the principles of art afresh.'

We turn now to those maturer forms of art which invest a dwelling with the highest intellectual sanctity, the daily companionship of which is one of the best pleasures wealth can enjoy, and one of the few poverty may envy. Odious is the luxury, even in a worldly sense, which has not the redeeming element of art. England would have been by this time the most detestable of nouveaux riches had she not applied some of the mammon her prosperity has given her to obtain that which may help to correct it. But we shall best estimate the treasures of art we now possess if we take a short retrospect of our former penury.

There are two ways in which a nation can honour artby the development of native genius, and by the acquisition of works which shall kindle and inform it. In both respects England has been peculiarly hindered from running the race with other countries. And there are two different points from which the taste and demand for art may start-the one the court, and the other private individuals. England began, as was natural, from the first. The fashion showed itself in the English court as early as in any other north of the Alps. Henry VIII., probably in mere emulation of his more genial brother Francis I., formed a small collection; but the taste, if he had it, was not transmitted to his children. It is true Ticozzi mentions Titian's having painted a picture, 'di divoto argomento,' for Queen Mary, but Elizabeth at all events had no sympathies of the sort; and it was well, as Horace Walpole says, that her successor had none either, or he would have introduced as bad a taste into the arts as he did into literature. Taught, therefore, probably by the precepts and example of the Earl of Arundel and the Duke of Buckingham -the first enlightened patrons of art in England-the two sons of James I., though of a descent-Scotch on one side, Danish on the other-little favourable to such tastes, developed an early partiality for paintings, and were both enthusiastic collectors from their youth. Prince Henry, who died at the age of eighteen, had already formed an interesting cabinet. To Charles I., however, belongs the merit of having gathered together a gallery which, as a whole, has never since been equalled in England for extent

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