had acquired by the force of his arms; he had reduced Armorick Britain to his vassalage; he reigned alone in England; he held Scotland and Wales under his yoke; but he was so great a lover of peace, that a maiden carrying a weight of gold might have walked securely through the whole island. A short time before this, he had given the bishopric of Dorchester to Remigius, a monk of Fescamp; but it displeased that bishop to have so inconsiderable a town assigned him for his see, when in the same diocese was the city of Lincoln, so much more worthy to be an Episcopal residence; wherefore, having purchased some lands on the top of the hill, he built a church on that spot. And although the archbishop of York as serted that the city belonged to his diocese, Remigius made little account of his claim, and pursued the work he had so commenced with such diligence that he completed it, and filled it with a clergy most approved for doctrine and morals. This Remigius was low of stature, but great in mind; dark in colour, but not in works; once he had been accused of a conspiracy against the king, but one of his servants undertaking the purgation of his lord by undergoing the ordeal of red hot iron, he was thus restored to the love of the king, and wiped clean from the stain of pontifical disgrace. Thus was founded the modern church of Lincoln.

V.-Death of William the Conqueror.

Anno 1087.

THIS same year, king William made his abode in Normandy for some time, during which he delayed the war which he meditated against the king of France. But Philip abusing his patience, is reported to have scurrifously said, "The king of England keeps his bed at Rouen, like a woman on childbed; but when he comes forth to his churching I will light him to church with a hundred thousand candles." The king, exasperated by this and other like sarcasms, in the ensuing month of August, while the corn was on the ground, the grapes in the vineyards, and the apples in the orchards, in all the abundance of the season, assembled a numerous army, and made an inroad into France, wasting and depopulating the country through which he went. Nothing could appease his resentment, but he

resolved to avenge the insult he had received at the cost of multitudes of innocent persons. At last he burned the town of Mantes, and destroyed in the flames the church of the Blessed Virgin, together with two of the holy Vestals (who remained within it, believing that even in that extremity it was not lawful for them to quit their habitation). The king, rejoicing in the sight of this destruction, called to his people to heap fuel upon the flames, and, approaching himself too near the conflagration, contracted a fever from the violence of the fire added to the unwholesome heats of the autumnal season. His disorder was further increased by an internal rupture, occasioned by leaping a ditch on horseback, so that he returned to Rouen in great pain of sickness; and, as his fever grew worse from day to day, took at last to his bed, being compelled by the violence of the distemper. The physicians who were consulted predicted his fast approaching dissolution from an inspection of his water. In an interval of strength, after having received the viaticum, and performed the Christian duty of confession, he bequeathed Normandy to his son Robert; England, and his maternal possessions, together with his treasures, to William Rufus. He commanded all prisoners to be released, and great sums of money to be distributed among the churches. He assigned a sufficiency for the repair of St Mary's church, lately burned by fire; and, having thus duly settled all his affairs, he died on the 8th of the ides of September, in the twenty-second year of his reign as king of England, and the fifty-second as duke of Normandy, the fifty-ninth of his age, and the 1088th of the holy incarnation. body was conveyed down the river Seine to Caen, and there buried, amidst a large concourse of prelates of the church.

His

Robert, the eldest son of the conqueror, was in France, engaged in the war against his father at the time of his death; and William Rufus hastened to England, while he was yet alive, conceiving that it would be more for his advantage to undertake that voyage immediately than to wait and attend his father's funeral. Henry alone, of all his children, was present at that solemnity, and paid, of his own money, 100 pounds of silver to a certain knight (whose patrimony extended to

to the spot in which the body of the king was interred), in order to restrain his tongue from uttering any reproach.

However, William was neither slow nor niggardly in the spending of money. He soon brought forth all the treasure which his father had accumulated at Winchester, and charitably assigned to the monasteries large sums of gold, together with five shillings of silver to the parish churches, and one hundred pounds to every county, to be distributed among the poor. After a time, moreover, he caused his father's tomb to be ornamented with a profusion of gold and silver and precious stones. After these things he was received by all men willingly for their king, and reduced all England under his subjection, and obtained the keys of all the treasures; in doing which, Lanfranc was of no small assistance to him; by whom he had been educated, and consecrated a knight, during his father's life-time. By him also he was crowned king of England, on the day of the holy martyrs Cosmus and Damian; and he afterwards spent the remaining part of the winter in peace. Soon afterwards, however, the nobles of the realm, almost all of them (not without the sin of perjury), made war against him, although crowned king, and, adopting his elder brother, Robert, to govern in his stead, committed the greatest ravages all over the country.

VI.-A German Count devoured by

Mice. Anno 1089.

In these days, a certain German count, who had been a bitter enemy to the emperor, while he was sitting one day at table in a melancholy mood, attended by his servants, was on a sudden so surrounded by a multitude of mice, that there appeared to be no means of escaping from them. So great was the number of those little animals, that one might have thought no country on earth had held so many; and the servants, though they armed themselves with clubs and sticks to drive them away, could do nothing at all to get rid of them. They seized on the count by their teeth, and tore him in a terrible manner; and, notwithstanding all the clubs and staves, not one of them was hurt; for the servants were unable, with all their endeavours, to strike or wound any of them. Even when they carried him in a ship out to sea, still

could he nowise avoid the fury of the mice; for a multitude of them immediately plunged themselves into the water, and swam after him, and gnawed the bottom and sides of the ship, till they made it leak, and threatened all on board with certain shipwreck. When the servants found this, they made again for the shore as fast as possible; but the mice had landed before them, and fell upon him again as they were bringing him from the ship. At last he was entirely torn to pieces by them, and made a feast to satisfy the cravings of their horrible hunger.

VII.-Death and Character of Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Anno 1089.

IN the same year died Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. This prelate, among other pious works, repaired the greater church of Christ at Canterbury, built offices for the monks, restored the dignities of the church which had fallen into neglect under his predecessors, recovered many lands which had been alienated from it, (among others, 25 several manors,) and constructed two inns for strangers without the city, to which he assigned out of his own possessions a sufficient yearly revenue for their maintenance. He repaired the church of Rochester, and ordained Hernost, a monk of Bec, to be Bishop thereof; at whose consecration was that verse found upon the altar, "Cito proferte stolam primam," &c. which the archbishop interpreted to predict his approaching death. And so, in effect, he died that same year, and was succeeded by Gundulph, a monk of Bec, who continued there to the time of king Henry.

He reduced to its former state the Abbey of Saint Alban, the blessed proto-martyr of England During the king's absence, he governed his realm; yet withal found ample time for study, to which he applied himself intensely. He endeavoured to correct the books of the Old and New Testament, corrupted by the errors of transcribers, and by the light of his emendations, the church of England, and that of France also, do to this day possess the benefit of being enlightened. After his death, king William retained in his own hands almost all the churches and monasteries of England, despoiling them of their possessions, and farming them as it were to persons of the laity.

MR NORTH,

CONSIDERING the excellence which the ancients attained in the fine arts, it is astonishing how little has been transmitted to posterity respecting the works and methods of their most distinguished artists; of the methods of their sculptors we literally know nothing; indeed I believe that many a learned fellow imagines that Phidias and Praxiteles actually worked with the chisel and mallet in their hands, hewing out the statue within the block, with no other guide or model than the idea in their own minds. I recollect to have read somewhere, that Michael Angelo laboured with such enthusiastic fury to get his statues extricated from the encasing rubbish, that it was quite marvellous to see him! Nothing, however, can be more ridiculous than the supposition of this species of the Cæsarian operation in sculpture; an art which requires the utmost patience and minute carefulness, and in which the merit of the artist consists in preparing the clay model. It is the artizan who fashions the marble; a humble species of mechanical industry scarcely removed from the toil of the common stone-cutter the task of the labourers in the workshops of Canova and Chantry.

But what renders the methods of the ancient sculptors still more curious as an object of inquiry, is, that, with out tools of steel or tempered iron, they should have been able to work with so much felicity not only in marble, but even in the harder substance of the precious stones. Their dexterity appears still more extraordinary when we reflect that it is necessary to employ the magnifying glass to inspect the minute beauty of many of their gems, cameos, intoglios, and medals. It is almost inconceivable how such works could have been produced with

VOL. VI.

out the aid of spectacles or the magnifying lens. That they possessed the magnifying mirror is extremely probable, for their looking-glasses being made of metal, it was almost a necessary result that they should discover the magnifying power of a polished concave surface. By some reflex application of the concave mirror their gem engravers may have been assisted; and I think it would not be difficult still to ascertain in what manner this was done. It has been supposed that in some instances they employed a drop of pellucid water in the perfora tion of a piece of metal; but I cannot, however, form any very distinct notion of the manner in which this magnifying power could be rendered useful to an engraver. But a pretty discovery of an ingenious friend of mine, and which I would recommend to the attention of our opticians, has suggested a better idea. He has discovered, that by nicely perforating a bit of paper, or any superficial substance, a plate of metal serving the best of all for the purpose, that in proportion to the size of the hole, a very considerable magnifying power is obtained over objects closely under the eye, and that distant objects are brought apparently nearer, and seen much more distinctly than by the unaided sight. It is therefore possible, that the ancient gem engravers may have made use of some contrivance of this nature.

Our information with respect to the methods of the painters of antiquity is also almost a blank. Their excellence both in drawing and in colouring cannot be questioned; for with such evidence as we possess of their attainments in sculpture, it is almost impossible, without a denial of the force of ocular demonstration, to refuse our acknowledgments to their superiority. We are told, indeed, that Zeuxis

M

formed the composition of his Juno* from the peculiar beauties of all the most beautiful women in Agrigentum; and that Apelles made use of burnt ivory mixed with varnish to augment the effect of his colours, and to defend them from the action of the air. But with the exception of these two solitary facts, the one in the art of design, and the other in that of colour ing, we possess no practical information respecting the methods of the ancient painters. The use of the black or burnt ivory by Apelles has been questioned by many writers on the fine arts as an improbable misconception; but Mr West has, within these few. years, employed it with so much success, that the colouring of his late pictures, compared with that of his earlier, does not appear to have been produced by the same hand. It serves to tune, if the expression may be allow ed, the various tones of colouring into one consistent frame of harmony.

At this time, when a taste for the fine arts has been so earnestly excited in the metropolis of Scotland, it may be useful both to the public and to artists to bring occasionally together some of the most authenticated notices respecting their progress and history, and for this object I would now and then beg admission into a corner of your agreeable Miscellany. Without prescribing to myself any precise rule either of theoretical investigation or of historical research, I propose, from time to time, to send you the substance of such memoranda as I have happened to accumulate in my common place book, either from books or conversation with artists. What I have gleaned from the latter will perhaps possess some originality. It will, however, be necessary now and then to advert to two or three circumstances with which every school-boy is acquainted, but things never become trite until they have been previously admired, and it should be recollected that the art of teaching by apologues has given rise to many fables which are still referred to as beautiful, although the original application of them is no longer remembered. For example, few cursory readers are aware that the elegant fable of the daughter of Debutotes sketching the profile of her sleeping lover by his shadow on the wall, is a parable invented to

* Pliny lib. xxix. Cap. ix. Genesis, chap. xxxi. and xxxv.

inculcate the principles of the art of portrait-painting. It may even be said, that it inculcates the principles of individual statuary; for Pliny mentions that she afterwards persuaded her father to make an image in clay of the likeness, and that it was preserved as a curious illustration of the progress of art, till the Consul Mummius destroyed Corinth. These principles are founded on resemblance and char acteristic expression; but this beautiful mythological tale teaches more: It implies, that in order to render the portrait or the statue peculiarly interesting, it is necessary that the situation should be chosen in circumstances where the original was seen to most advantage by the parties for whom the work was designed. To the eye of a fond and tender lover, the most affecting situation is that which is associated with the defenceless confidence of sleep.

But I do not propose to enter into any explanation of the classic apologues respecting the arts. I have only adverted to this one, for the present, to shew, that although they have been rendered trite by the incessant reference to them in college verses, they are still curious lessons, and contain more than meets the ear.

Historians differ about the birthplace of sculpture. But the art was undoubtedly early cherished in Asia. Laban, we are informed, adored idols‡ abominated by Jacob. Some, however, are of opinion, that the Ethiopians were the first who employed visible symbols as objects of adoration,§ and that of course they were the inventors of sculpture. Others ascribe the invention to the Chaldeans, and refer, in proof of their hypothesis, to the statue erected by Ninus in honour of his father. But the Greek philosophers considered Egypt as the cradle of the arts; and Plato says, that works of painting and sculpture may be found in Egypt executed ten thousand years ago. Pausanius thought that at first the priests exhibited a stone, or the trunk of a tree, as the emblems of their gods. Herodotus, the father of profane history, says, that the ancient Egyptians were accustomed to carve the one end of a stick into the form of a head, and, with scarcely more art, to trace a few imperfect lines on the other into a resemblance of feet. In this state they transmitted the art of sculp

+Cavaliere Ferro, vol. i. p. 41.

§ Contarino il Vago, p. 420.

ture to Greece. Pausanius mentions, that there was an ancient statue at Pygolia, which served to illustrate the history of the arts, the feet and hands of which were closely joined to the body, similar, no doubt, to the Egyptian statues in the British Museum. The first attempts in sculpture were no doubt with flexible materials, such as clay or wax. The next were probably with wood, and then marble;metal, as requiring the aid of another art, was perhaps the last material employed by the genius of sculpture.

The earliest among the Greeks who wrought in marble, were the sons of Dædalus, Dipœnus and Scyllis,* who lived in the first Olympiad, that is, about 576 years before Christ. Phidias, who flourished about 120 years later, carried the art to its utmost perfection. It has certainly not since approached the same degree of excellence, if we admit the Athenian marbles in the British Museum to be his works; and if they were not his works, as there is some reason to believe, we have still but an imperfect conception of the improvements of which the art is susceptible.

On one occasion, when a party of artists were dining with Sir Joshua Reynolds, while Burke and Dr Johnson were present, the conversation turned on this very subject. Sir Joshua observed, that it was impossible to understand what was meant among the Greeks, by their saying that the art of sculpture was in its decline in the days of Alexander the Greatthe Apollo Belvidere and the Venus de Medici being considered as the productions of that illustrious epoch; and neither the ingenuity of Burke, nor the erudition of Johnson, could solve the enigma. But the merits of the sculptures of the Parthenon were then unknown; I mean the Elgin or more properly the Athenian marbles; and it should be borne in mind, that even they were placed in the exterior of the edifice, merely for the purpose of decoration. The statue of the Goddess by Phidias was in the interior of the temple.

It might be objected to as a paradox, to say that none of the masterpieces of the sculptors of antiquity have yet been acquired by the moderns, but it is certain that none of those, which we consider as such, were particularly famous among the an

cients. It is at least doubtful if the Apollo Belvidere is the same statue of which Pliny speaks in such terms of admiration as the work of Scopias.The Venus by this artist was one of the ornaments of ancient Rome-but it is now unknown. He was the architect of the mausoleum which Arlimisia raised to the memory of her husband one of the wonders of the world. The standard by Polectetis is lost a statue in which all the most beautiful proportions of the human figure were so admirably preserved, that it was constantly referred to by artists as a model, and thus acquired the name of the Standard. The Media of Euticrates is also no longer known to exist. The critics in the time of Praxiteles were divided in their opinion with respect to his two Venuses and his Phryne; but he himself preferred his Satyr, and particularly his Cupid, to all his works, and they also are no more.The story of Pygmalion is of itself a striking comment on the excellence of the lost statues of antiquity; and that of the Colossus of Rhodes shows how far superior in the magnificence of the art the ancients were to the moderns. Glicones of Athens, who produced the Farnesian Hercules, doubtless left other works, which, if not in the same degree, were probably in the same high style of art, but they have all perished. At Agrigentum I saw the foot of a colossal Juno, belonging to the late Mr Fagan, in point of execution, and greatness of style, equal to any thing that lately adorned the Louvre. But although the utmost diligence was employed to find the remainder of the statue, the search was fruitless. At Syracuse, a headless Venus was lately discovered, which, in the opinion of many good judges, is superior to the Venus de Medicis.

The Jews have never been considered as entitled to any merit as artists, and it has been supposed that the prohibition in the Second Commandment has been the cause of their deficiency in the arts. But the prohibition only referred to idols of adoration, for Moses himself, the oracle of the command, made the brazen serpent; and Solomon, their wisest king, dealt largely in sculptured pomegranates, to say nothing of the twelve oxen which supported the brazen sea, or of the golden lions that adorned the steps of his throne. As for the cherubim, of which