SPECTATOR'S LIBRABY.

America. Ihrroar.

Sketches of the History of Christian Art. By Lord Lindsay. Volumes I. It. IIL

FICTION, Murray.

The Will, or the Half-Brothers; a Romance. In three volumes Bentley. MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE,

Homes and Haunts of the most Eminent British Poets. By William Howitt. The

Illustrations by W. and 0. hieasom. In two volumes. Bentley.

LORD LINDSAY'S SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART.

THIS work is the result of learning, knowledge of art, extensive travel, and an ardent feeling, more akin to love or devotion than to enthusiasm. The general subject Lord Lindsay touches upon is the principles of art and the artistical nature of man : that part of it which he travels over involves the hieroglyphics of the Greek and Romish Churches, the legends and superstitions which ignorance and credulity very early en- grafted on Christianity, and a critically descriptive examination of art in its largest sense,—architecture, painting, and sculpture, with some of the subordinate branches,—through all its chances and changes from the de- cline of Roman art in the fourth century down even to the present day. To what length so extensive a work may proceed, we do not know. The three volumes before us embrace the symbols of the early Christians; specimens of the legends and superstitions, or, as Lord Lindsay calls them, the "mythology of Christianity' —as contained in the spurious Gospels, the Lives of the Saints, and other apocryphal literature; with a survey of the history and character of Christian art, from its first rise in the Catacombs of Rome, till the Byzantine style was perfected, to perish, by the great founders of modern art.

We have spoken of the lore, the knowledge, and the actual experience of which these volumes are the result : the study and exhibition of such extensive subjects, even so far as their execution has yet gone, is evidence of one of the first qualities of greatness,—energetic perseverenoe ; as well as of that untiring zeal which animates a person thoroughly pos- sessed with his subject, and which the ancients expressed by the word " inspiration," and modern fanatics term "a call." Lord Lindsay is not, however, a man of genius. He may have the enthusiasm, the energy,. and part of the imagination; but he wants " the imagination all compact"; above all, he wants that sound sense which enables the..nind instinctively to arrive at a just conclusion, and that clearness of conception which shows itself in perspicuity and force of expression, throwing a light like that of day over everything it glances upon. In one sense these Sketches of the History of Christian Art are like the fabled contention of the principles of good and evil. When their author is selecting and condensing the legends of the earlier Christians, he exhibits judgment in the choice and skill in the compression ; his description of the external forms of works of art are clear in the images and close in the style ; the numerous biographical and critical notices with which his accounts of the different schools are interspersed, if not remarkable, like the artistical criticisms of the late John Bell, for profound knowledge and penetrating acumen, are informing, just, characteristic, and often interesting : but when he attempts to untbld his own theories, exhibit the principles he would deduce from his facts, or rise to lofty speculations and pane- gyrics upon the arts in their vital essence, he becomes hazy or transcen- dental. In these passages there is undoubtedly a view which will repay the reader for the trouble of getting at it, but it is hidden in a maze of words. Lord Lindsay seems as if he required to be bound down by the tangible in order to be clear—to be controlled by the text of an autho. rity, or of the visible form, in order to be definite. He is like a creature that can master its movements on the ground, but whose wings fly away with it as soon as it attempts to soar.

The starting theory or principle of Lord Lindsay is that of " progres. sion"; and he says that it is the same which he inculcated in Progres- sion by Antagonism,—though, beyond the use of the same word, we trace no similarity between that work and the one before us. According to Lord Lindsay, there are three elements or governing principles in art,—sense, intellect, and spirit,—each of which may be animated and elevated by the ideal. The highest development of the principle of sense is to be found in the vast and massy architecture of ancient Egypt. The triumph of intellect is exhibited in the sculpture of Greece—" the voice of intellect and thought, communing with itself in solitude, feeding on beauty, and yearning after truth."

" The painting of Christendom (and we must remember that the glories ri Christianity, in the fall extent of the term, are yet to come) is that of an im- mortal spirit conversing with its God.

" And, as if to mark more forcibly, the fact ofentinuotts progress towards per- fection, it is observable, that although each of the three arts peculiarly reflects and characterizes one of the three epochs, each art of later growth has been preceded in its rise, progress, and decline, by an antecedent correspondent development of its elder sister or sisters,—sculpture, in Greece, by that of architecture; painting, in Europe, by that of architecture and sculpture. If sculpture and painting stand by the side of architecture in Egypt, if painting by that of architecture and sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish and unformed. In Ea- ror4ctloounewar not three found linked together in equal stature and perfection will now be surprisedat my clailtLegguasuperiority ere for Christianover Classic art, in all her three departments. If man stand higheror lower in the scale of being according as he is spiritual, intellectual, or sensual, Christian art must excel Pagan by the same rule and in the same proportion.

" As men cannot rise above their principles, so the artists of Greece never rote above the religions and moral sentiments of the age."

Lord Lindsay has also a theory of race, and other views approaching the fanciful in idea and verging upon the dreamy in expression. Like men, too, who are enthusiastic in a pursuit, he seems to attribute higher excellence to favourite schools of art, with which he has cultivated an intimacy, than they in reality possess. If we rightly understand him, he considers the old Byzantine school, and its development in Italy and Germany, as a higher class of Christian art than the subsequent achieve• ments in the age of the great painters : and, if we merely consider the pure and devotional feeling of some of the artists, beaming through their works, such may possibly be true, in 4imited sense of "Christian art" ; but the principle is critically heterodox in an enlarged sense. Stlil more questionable is an opinion Lord Lindsay appears to hold, that we are approaching an mra of greater excellence in art than has yet been attained ; which must rather be the belief of faith than the induc- tion of reason.

Two tables of Christian symbols are introduced into the preliminary portion of the book, which have been compiled from elaborate works upon that curious subject. They will be found useful to the reader who di- rects his attention to religious pictures ; not only serving to realize or interpret the meaning of the painter, but often to identify the per- sons represented. The feature in the compilation itself is merely se- lection ; but the labour in making it was probably considerable, from the number of subjects to be gone through, and the judgment and knowledge required to select what the student was most likely to meet with. A few specimens will give an idea of this branch of the book.

GENERAL SYMBOLS.

Heaven is symbolized by the segment of a circle, sometimes of pure blue, some- times edged with the three colours of the rainbow.

The Universe—by a globe or sphere, usually of deep blue.

God the Father—by a hand issuing from the preceding symbol of Heaven; Eget. ii. 9, viii. 3.

God the Son—by the cross, although more correctly the symbol of salvation

through the atonement • • • The Holy Trinity—by the three-coloured rainbow encircling our Saviour, the visible form or image of the Deity, and who sometimes is represented seated upon it; Esek. i. 28; Rev. iv. 3.

by three beams of light radiating from the head of Christ. —and by the extension of the thumb, fore and middle fingers of our Saviour's

band, as held up in giving the benediction. • •

The Church Militant—by a vessel in full sail; an emblem originally heathen, but naturalized and carried out into the most minute and fanciful particulars by the ancient Fathers.

SYMBOLS OF SAINTS.

S. Agatha—usually carries a pair of pincers and her breasts, which were cut off during her martyrdom. After being taken back to prison, a venerable man entered and told her that he thought she might recover ; and believing him a phy- sician, she refused any medicament except from Christ: but the old man, smiling, answered that he was S. Peter ',and had been sent to her by Christ; and immediately disappearing, she found herself whole and well.

S. Agnes—is accompanied by a lamb, as emblematical of her name and her Wit/. S. Ambrose, Doctor of the Church—bears a scourge, in allusion to his repulse of the Emperor Theodosius the Great from the Cathedral of Milan, after the massacre of Thessalonica.

S. Andrew—the cross usually known by his name.

S. Antony the Abbot (of Nitria)—a staff and a bell, denoting mendicancy; and a pig, in allusion to his having crushed the desires of the flesh, or to his having been originally a swineherd,—a tradition, however, discredited by the si- lence of S. Athanasius. S. Apollonia—carries a 'pair of pincers holding a tooth, all her teeth having been drawn in the course of her martyrdom.

The section devoted to Christian Mythology, or those legends of patri- archs, apostles, and saints, which furnished the subjects -for art and lite- rature during the dark and middle ages, is the most attractive for popular reading. Selected and curtailed as the legends are by Lord Lindsay, they combine the interest of a supernatural story with the exhibition of a state of actual belief; and very often of actual manners, (for we think he only once takes a tale which professes to describe a condition of things long after that condition had passed away) ; while the trivialities, length, and flatness of the originals, are got rid of. The matter in this part is curious as exhibiting the superstition and fanaticism of the human mind ; as it will enable the reader to realize allusions in poetry as well as in works of art. The general reader of Paradise Lost may remember lists of high-sounding titles, which the following account will enable him better to understand.

THE HEAVENLY HIERARCHIES.

The Heavenly Host is divided (according to ecclesiastical authorities) into three hierarchies, and each hierarchy into three orders, nine therefore in all. To the Upper Hierarchy belong the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, dwelling nearest to God and in contemplation rather than action; and to whom appertain, severally and distinctively, perfect love, perfect wisdom, and perfect rest. To the Middle Hierarchy—the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; to whom are committed the general government of the universe, the gift of miracles in the cause of God, and the office of resisting and casting out devils. To the Lower—the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels; intrusted with the rule and ordinance of nations, that of provinces or cities, and that of individuals of the human race,—every man being attended by two angels, the one evil, per- suading him to sin, for the exercise of his faith, the other good, suggesting righteousness and truth, and protecting him from the former.

We have more than once noted the fact of permanent superstitions being founded in nature,—that is, having had a real existence in the minds of men, however unreal they might be in fact. In like manner, the tales of the temptations and visitations to which the saintly founders of monachism were said to be exposed, were not mere inventions, but actually seen in spirit by the worn and weakened anchorite. We now know that some nervous diseases produce optical illusions, even when the patient's mind has not been directed to the subject of the apparition. What more likely than that the devout ascetic, exhausted by fasting, ex- cited by its consequent weakness, and crazed by contemplation, should, in a half dreamy half extatic state, have hadl spectral forms appear before him, taking their shape from the colour of his thoughts. Those saints who had previously lived in the world seem to have been much assailed by the ghosts of its pleasures. Hilarion, a Syrian saint of the fourth century, who withdrew to the desert before he was fifteen, was less troubled with delusions of the gay world than Anthony and others ; his mental images taking a form with which his experience was doubtless more familiar. Hilarion's biographer was his contemporary Jerome, who wrote the ascetic's life within twenty years of his death ; and thus de- scribes some of his austerities and trials.

" From his sixteenth to his twentieth year, he sheltered himself from heat and saia in his little hat, which he had woven of bulrushes and sedge. He built after- wards a small cell, which exists even to the present day, four feet broad and five high; lower that is to say than his own stature, and in length little more than his y required; so that you would have thought it a sepulchre rather than the resi- dence of a human being. " Once only in the year did he poll his hair. He slept ever till his death on bul- rushes strewed on the bare ground. He never washed the shirt which be had wee put on; saying it VMS superfluous to study cleanliness in sackcloth. Nor did he change his tunic for another, till it was utterly in rags. And after prayers and psalms, having the Scriptures by heart, he recited them as if God were present.

" As Hilarion advanced in age, Satan addressed himself to his senses, filling him with evil thoughts of the pleasures of the flesh. Angry therefore with him- self, and beating his breast, as if he could exclude thoughts by blows, he thus addressed his body—' Ass that thou art, 1 will provide that thou kick not! I will feed thee, not with corn but with chaff! By hunger and by thirst will I wear thee out; with heavy burdens will I crush thee down-' by heat and cold will I bring thee to think of food instead of wantonness!' From this time, accordingly, fasting till the third or fourth day, he sustained fainting nature with the,' ince of herbs and a few figs; praying frequently, and singing psalms, and digging the pound with a spade, that the exercise of his hands might double that of his fast- ing.. And at other times, weaving baskets with bulrushes, he emulated the dis- cipline of the Egyptian monks and the sentence of the Apostle, who says, He that works not, let him not eat.' His body, meanwhile, through the discipline, became so wasted away that it scarcely adhered to his bones. "On a certain night be began to hear the crying of infants, the bleating of sheep, and lowing of cattle, the weeping as it were of women, the roaring of lions, the hollow tramp of an army, and portents, moreover, of various voices--devices of devils, tempting him by the terrors of sound before eesayiug those of sight. He recognized their sport; and, prostrate on his knees, he marked the cross of Chriat on his forehead, and, armed with that helmet, and girt round with the breast plate of faith, stood boldly on his defence, desiring, if possible, to see those whom he was terrified to hear, and gazing hither and thither with anxious eyes. When on a sudden, the moon shining brightly, he perceived a chariot and horses rush furiously upon him, but when he had called on Jesus, suddenly, before his eyes, all that pageant sunk into the earth, and disappeared. Then he cried, ' The horse and his rider bath he cast into the seal' and Some put their trust in chariots and some in horses, but we will remember the name of the Lord our Godt' " Many were his temptations and the snares of the devils by night and day; all of which were I to rehearse, I should exceed the measure of my volume. How often women tempting him to sin, how often banquets, richly spread before him, in hunger. At one time, while praying, a howling wolf, at another a barking jackal leaped over him; and while singing psalms, a company of gladiators ap- peared and fought before him, one of whom, falling before his feet as if wounded to death, craved sepulture. " On one occasion he was praying with his head fixed to the earth; and, as might befall any man, his thoughts having wandered from his prayer, ha was dreaming I know not what, when his persecutor leaped upon his back, and spar- ring his sides, and beating his neck with a scourge, Ha, ha!' he cried; ' what, nodding ?'" As the spectral world originated in bona fide forms presented to the mind's eye, so some of the monsters of the ancient world might have had a like foundation in nature ; the notions of their impossible structure aris- ing from their having been imperfectly seen by ignorance. The satyr of the Classical, and some demoniac creatures of the Christian mythology, evi- dently had their prototypes in the larger animals of the ape family. Hilarion himself worked a miracle on what was clearly a boa constrictor, if there is any foundation of truth in the tale ; and Lord Lindsay offers this defence of the dragons. " The dragons of early tradition, whether aquatic or terrestrial, are not perhaps wholly to be regarded as fabulous. In the case of the former, the race may be supposed to have been perpetuated till the marshes or inland seas left by the deluge were dried up. Hence, probably, the legends of the Lerman hydra, &c. As respects their terrestrial brethren, (among whom the serpent, for example, which is said to have checked the army of Regulus for three days near the river Bagradas, ai Numidia, will be at once remembered,) their existence, testified as it is by the universal credence of antiquity, is not absolutely incredible. Lines of descent are constantly becoming extinct in animal genealogy, especially in the case of branches of a family transplanted in early and more congenial ages into regions remote from the parent domicile, and where the climate has gradually changed; to say nothing of the assiduity of man in rooting them out."

Of the two divisions of art proper, which Lord Lindsay treats of in these three volumes, the Byzantine period is the briefer, and perhaps in a purely artistical sense the less interesting. It ie, however, dt, rigys and attractive, from the antiquity and unsophisticated nature of its subject; distinct qualities as much as merits often giving character to criticism, so that a peculiar work may interest more in description than in reality. Tracing the origin of Christian art to the Catacombs, where necessity forced many pratices upon the Christians, Lord Lindsay describes how the Roman basilica or court of justice with certain modifications became the model of the Western church when the persecuted religionists emerged in triumph, ornaments and superadded details being drawn from the habits enforced in their under-ground refuge; while in the Eastern church another from (the Greek cross) and the use of the dome prevailed. Brought into the garish eye of day, the pictorial style of the Catacombs soon withered with the decline of Roman art, to be replaced by Byzantine skill, animated or at least guided by the theological opinions of its patrons the clergy. As a mat- ter of style or treatment—of that external form by which we are enabled to decide upon a school and sometimes an individual master at a glance— Byzantine art continued dominant almost till the rise of that wonderful genius Leonardo da Vinci; and Lord Lindsay describes works of the Mosaic artists of this school down to the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies. But the Lombard and Gothic style, he holds, arose about the middle of the sixth century, and was first developed in architecture. This branch of art, Lord Lindsay considers, sprang immediately into full vigour, if not perfect excellence, animated by the new life of the Northern nations ; in Italy taking the form which he calls Lombard, of which the Byzantine church with its dome was the prototype, but changing into some form of Gothic beyond the Alps. In Lord Lindsay's opinion, sculp- ture was not revived till Niccola Pisano, towards the middle of the thir- teenth century, (1233,) laid the foundation of the modern style. " Niccola's peculiar praise is this —that, in practice at least, if not in theory he first established the principle ;hat the study of nature, corrected by the ideal of the antique, and animated by the spirit of Christianity, personal and social can alone lead excellence in art; each of the three elements of human nature— Matter, Mind and Spirit—being thus brought into union and cooperation in the service of God, in due relative harmony and subordination. I cannot over-eaki- mate the importance of this principle: it was on this that, consciously or uncon- sciously, Niecela himself worked; it has been by following it that Donatello and Ghiberti, Leonard, Raphael, and Michael Angelo, have risen to glory. The Sienese school and the Florentine, minds contemplative and dramatic, are alike beholden to it for whatever success has attended their efforts. Like a treble-stranded rope, it drags after it the triumphal car of Christian art. But if either of the strands be broken—if either of the three elements be pursued disjointedly from the other two—the result is, in each respective case, grossness,. or pedantry, or weakness: the exclusive imitation of nature produces a Caravaggio, a Rubens, a Rembrandt —that of the antique, a Pellegrino di Tibaldo and a David; and though there be a native chastity and taste in religion, which restrains those who worship it abstractedly from intellect and sense from running into such extremes, it cannot at least supply that mechanical apparatus which will enable them to soar— such devotees must be content to gaze up into heaven, like angels cropt of their wings " Painting did not emerge from the formality of the Byzantine style till quite the close of the century, (1295,) when Giotto first began his inde- pendent career : for Lord Lindsay holds that Giotto, and not his master Cimabue, was the true founder of modern art ; though we should rather incline to Leonardo, as exhibiting no traces of the trammels of the older school, and even now, after so many centuries and such vast changes in manners and opinions, requiring no allowances for his style.

With a survey of the life and works of Giotto and his followers, and a view of the state of art beyond the Alps, embracing the Van Eycks, Quentin Matsys, Albert Durer, and the Holbeins, the volumes close. The treatment of the different subjects included in these Sketches is mo- dified by the matter, extent, and character of the originals ; brief when they are scanty, ample when plentiful. One general system, however, distinguishes the whole. Lord Lindsay begins by giving an account or description of the style, and then a notice of the principal existing works of the school, with notices more or less full of its founders and their followers. However reducible to a brief exposition, in practice this principle is so varied, modified, and extended by the character of its subjects, that no description or even quotation will convey an accurate idea of the book itself, though extracts may give a notion of the author's style, and be suggestive of the manner. The following sketch of the present state of the Duomo at Toreello, the parent isle and parent church of Venice, is an example of the method by which Lord Lindsay occa- sionally enriches the accounts of art by descriptions of nature. " Imagination can scarcely conceive agreater contrast than exists between this towering pile [St. Mark's] and the little church I have just described in the neighbouring isle of Tor o. There everything is on the tiniest scale; you can touch with your hand the capitals of the columns that support the roof. I have elsewhere noticed the diminutive baptistery; and though the basilica be a re- spectably-sized pariah church, its title of Duomo prepares one to expect a build- ing of far greater magnitude. The contrast is striking, too, in other respects. The spot once so populous is now almost utterly abandoned. The two churches, the baptistery and steeple, an isolated marble column, an ancient well, sculptured with the Greek cross, the Archivio and Tribunal, (such no longer,) these, and one or two dilapidated buildings, all closely adjacent, are the sole remains Of the ancient town, and form now the centre of a wilderness; the piazza which they encircled is completely overgrown with grass and divided by hedgerows—a narrow pathway is the only street; the little birds sing amid the profound silence; and on finishing your survey, you will probably find yonraelf leaning against the marble pillar which once sustained the flag-staff of the republic, long before those of her tributary principalities, Cyprus and Candia, waved in the breeze. I know nothing in its way like Toreello; it is a scene sui generic for simplicity and soli- tude, and yet not melancholy, for they are not the ruins of fallen greatness: the emotions excited are akin rather to those one experiences in visiting the source of some mighty. river, or gazing at the portrait of a hero in his childhood; or, if a sadness will involuntarily steal on one amidst the solitude, it is little to 'that which broods over S. Marks, gorgeous as it rises in its Oriental blazonry: the widowed flag-staffs and the unpeopled piazza tell of a glory that has passed away; there you are lost in a moral solitude, darkly shadowed by the desolate cloud,' that decay, ruin, and disgrace, have flung over the lovely wall' of Venice."

The following is a description of one of the last great efforts of genuine Byzantine art.

THE MENOLOGION.

These centuries, Cthe ninth and tenth,] so emphatically " dark " in Europe, were a shade less so in Greece; the " light of other clays " was dim, but not ex- tingulahed. Georgius, Pantaleo, Nestor Menas, and Symeon of Blachernos, (the court-quarter,) were probably the leading artists at Byzantium at the close of the tenth century, when, with two or three assistants, they illuminated the celebrated Menologion for till Emperor Basil II., now preserved in the Vatican. It is a thick folio volume, filled with small paintings, representing the martyrdoms of the Saints commemorated, as well as almost all the traditional compositions from sacred history; a volume of rare beauty, and which it is impossible to turn over without a glow of rapture, so exquisite is the vellum, so delicate the calligraphy, and so rich and brilliant am illuminations, fresh as if finished yesterday. They are deficient, indeed, in the originality and fire noticeable in many earlier works; but a deep religious feeling reigns throughout. The martyrdoms are the worst; but where there is no violent action, the attitudes are easy and dignified, the drapery broad and well adjusted, the air noble and the expression good; the emotions of piety, reverential awe and resignation, well rendered, though grief, except in a few instances, runs into caricature. The flesh betrays a tendency to emaciation, but not revoltingly so. The sky is always of gold; the backgrounds are either architectural in the Byzantine style, or mountainous, the summit of each mountain lopped (as it were) short in two or three places, the shrubs and trees at their feet rising to a third or half of their height. Perspective, of course, there is none, although an attempt is always made to give the colouring of distance, blue and pink; but it is easy to imagine how rudely. Altogether, it is not easy to apply a higher epithet to the painters of the Menologion than that of good mechanical punters for the time—infinitely superior in that respect to their contemporaries in Western Europe.

IIOLEELT

The younger, to whom the surname is usually appropriated absolutely, as if the elder had never existed, was born at Augsburg in 1495 or 1498, and instructed by his father, along with two brothers who never rose above mediocrity. He accompanied his father to Basle when little more than a boy; assisted him in his works there; and was received into the Company of Painters in 1520. In 1526, wearied of home by the bad temper of his wife,* he visited England with letters of recommendation from Erasmus to Sir Thomas More; who welcomed him kindly, received him into his house, and procured him the patronage of Henry VIII. He worked there three years, and returned to Basle in 1529 for three more; but in 1532 took up his abode permanently in England, only once afterwards revisiting his native country. He died at London, of the plague, in 1554, after a long and

* He was a worthless character himself ; so that one is inclined to be sceptical on this point.

brilliant career—the first of the long line of portrait-painters, some of foreign, some of native extraction—the Mores, Dlytensts, Vandykes, Lelys, Knellers, Jervases, Hudsons, Ramsays, Reynoldsea, and Lawrences—by whom the lineaments of the loveliest, the bravest, and the best of each successive generation of British worthies, have been handed down to posterity. Nothing can surpass the portraits of Holbein in their peculiar style of truth, actual, and unidealized: his heads are life itself, but life in repose, as the originals appeared when resting on the lowest step of their intellectual or moral ladder; the eager eye, the speaking lip of the great portrait-painters of Italy, his contempo- raries, seldom or never animate them; he is still the successor of Van Eyck, al- though excelled by Albert Durer alone among the whole line of portrait-painters North of the Alps, prior to Rubens. To enumerate his chefs-d'oeuvre in this limited line, would be endless: I shall mention one only,—which partakes indeed of a loftier character and is the most beautiful perhaps of all his works,—the " Burgomaster of Basle," kneeling with his family before the Virgin, now at Dresden. The Virgin, in spite of a slight double chin, is peculiarly sweet, although not very young or virginal; the kneeling bur- gomaster is perfect in his way, the hands clasped, gazing upwards in devotion. Softness and richness characterize this picture to a remarkable degree; and, set- ting aside the best of Albert Diirer's, scarcely any other production of the German school of the sixteenth century equals it in parity and beauty. Holbein would seem to have undergone just so much Italian influence previous to painting it, as sufficed to infuse into tin old German feeling and style the utmost beauty they were susceptible of; for the picture is still very German, and he has not in the least compromised his originality. This picture was painted, it is believed, be- tween 1529 and 1532; and strange it is that the gleam of purer and loftier taste should have totally passed away—his later works are precisely what his earlier were, truthful but hard, like sincerity without love.

A remarkable feature in this book is the untiring energy with which it is carried on. Lord Lindsay is as fresh and his manner as animated at the conclusion as at starting : he seems neither to weary nor to pall. The vast extent of his knowledge, and still more of his actual observa- tion of specimens of art, will strike most readers ; but, though his in- dustry is undoubtedly great in both these departments, yet it is not quite so great as it seems. Foreign antiquaries and critics of the present and past ages have accumulated stores of materials, both in plates and their descriptions, which, however unknown to the general reader, and perhaps even scarce in England, are accessible enough to the virtuoso, and serve at once as a substitute or a guide. Many writers have treated of the history of art and the biographies of artists, furnishing ample both of materials and assistance : so that throughout the whole of his vast range Lord Lindsay has his roads marked out and the points of interest and curiosity noted. Still he is entitled to the merit of a critical study of his authorities; and in most cases he has had recourse to the originals, using the plates or descriptions as a guide-book to the specimens, where they yet survive. Such a task is a work of time and travel ; and it appears incidentally that Lord Lindsay began the pursuit of a connoisseur at a very early age, and has continued it through all his travels in Europe and the East ; knowledge, perhaps, suggesting the idea of his work, rather than the notion of a book inducing him to set about acquiring knowledge. And it is this idea or choice of subject which seems to us the most striking feature of the work, endowing the whole with interest and vitality similar to that which life imparts to the body. The title is not, indeed, free from critical objection ; some of the artists and works noticed had little or nothing to do with " Christian art " beyond the influence exercised upon the men by the Christian society into which they were born and among which they lived. Some of our great dramatists might as well be introduced into a history of Christian literature. This, however, is a technical objection. Their presence gives completeness to the review of art, while the leading idea imparts a unity to the whole which is continually and beneficially felt. Connected with the symbols and mythology of Christianity, the art of the middle ages starts at once into life and meaning; in the rise and progress of the predecessors of the modern schools we seem by means of Christianity to anchor on a first cause, at the same time that we feel the principle of stability ; and, as art becomes applied to secular purposes, the greatness of the artists enables the reader to overlook the incongruity. Sketches of the History of Christian Art not only fulfils the object proposed, but may be recommended as better qualifying the mind to com- prehend history, and (carefully read) to open a new source of interest to the tourist and the lover of art, by enabling him to see the things signi- fied in the signs.