and knock pictures and images to pieces. Flaxman says, "The commands for destroying sacred paintings and sculpture prevented the artist from suffering his mind to rise to the contemplation or execution of any sublime effort, as he dreaded a prison or a stake, and reduced him to the lowest drudgery in his profession. This extraordinary check to our national art occurred at a time which offered the most essential and extraordinary assistance to its progress." Flaxman proceeds to remark, "the civil wars completed what fanaticism had begun, and English art was so completely extinguished that foreign artists were always employed for public or private undertakings."

Charles I. was a great lover and patron of the fine arts, and during his reign they made rapid advances in England; but the blind zeal of the Puritans dispersed his splendid gallery, and destroyed almost every vestige of art. In the Journal of the House, July 23d, 1645, it is "Ordered, that all pictures having the second person of the Trinity, be burnt." Walpole relates that one Blessie was hired at half-a-crown a day to break the painted windows in Croydon church." One Dowsing was employed from June 9th, 1642, to October 4th, 1644, in this holy business, and by calculation it is found that he and his agents had destroyed about 4660 pictures, evidently not all glass, because when they were glass he so specified them.

"The result of this continued persecution," says

Haydon, "was the ruin of high art, for the people had not taste enough to feel any sympathy for it independently of religion, and every man who has pursued it since, who had not a private fortune, and was not supported by a pension, like West, became infallibly ruined."

PAINTINGS EVANESCENT.

"Few works are more evanescent than paintings. Sculpture retains its freshness for twenty centuries. The Apollo and the Venus are as they were. But books are perhaps the only productions of man coeval with the human race. Sophocles and Shakspeare can be produced and reproduced forever. But how evanescent are paintings, and must necessarily be! Those of Zeuxis and Apelles are no more, and perhaps they have the same relation to Homer and Eschylus, that those of Raffaelle and Guido have to Dante and Petrarch.

"There is however, one refuge from the despon. dency of this contemplation. The material part, indeed, of their works must perish, but they survive in the mind of man, and the remembrances of them are transmitted from generation to generation. The poet embodies them in his creations, and the sys. tems of philosophers are modeled to gentleness by their contemplation; opinion, that legislator, is infected with their influence; men become better and wiser; and the unseen seeds are perhaps thus sown which shall produce a plant more excellent than that from which they fell."-Shelley.

There is at least another refuge. Paintings are now rendered as permanent as books by engraving, or statuary, by mosaics. In the time of Pliny, there were Greek paintings in Rome 600 years old. There is a painting at Florence dated 886. It is also to be hoped that christianity and civilization have made such advances, that no more Goths, Vandals, Turks, and fanatics, will take pleasure in demolishing works of art as in ages past.

THE ENGLISH NATIONAL GALLERY.

"A fine gallery of pictures is a sort of illustration of Berkeley's theory of matter and spirit. It is like a palace of thought-another universe, built of air, of shadows, of colors. Everything seems palpable to feeling as to sight; substances turn to shadows by the arch-chemic touch; shadows harden into substances; 'the eye is made the fool of the other senses, or else worth all the rest.' The material is in some sense embodied in the immaterial, or at least we see all things in a sort of intellectual mir

ror.

The world of art is an enchanting deception. We discover distance in a glazed surface; a province is contained in a foot of canvass; a thin evanescent tint gives the form and pressure of rocks and trees; an inert shape has life and motion in it. Time stands still, and the dead reappear by means of this so potent art!

"What hues (those of nature mellowed by time) breathe around, as we enter! What forms are there

woven into the memory! What looks, which only the answering looks of the spectator can express ! What intellectual stores have been yearly poured forth from the shrine of ancient art! The works are various, but the names the same; heaps of Rembrandts frowning from their darkened walls-Rubens' glad gorgeous groups-Titian's more rich and rare-Claude always exquisite, sometimes beyond compare-Guido's endless cloying sweetness-the learning of Poussin and the Caracci—and Raphael's princely magnificence, crowning all. We read certain letters and syllables in the catalogue, and at the well-known magic sound a miracle of skill and beauty starts to view.

"Pictures are a set of chosen images, a stream of pleasant thoughts passing through the mind. It is a luxury to have the walls of our rooms hung round with them, and no less so to have such a gallery in the mind,-to con over the relics of ancient art bound up 'within the book and volume of the brain, unmixed, (if it were possible) with baser matter.' A life passed among pictures, in the study and love of art, is a happy, noiseless dream or rather it is to dream and to be awake at the same time, for it has all the sober certainty of waking bliss,' with the romantic voluptuousness of a visionary and abstracted being. They are the bright consummate essence of things, and he who knows of these delights, 'to taste and interpose them oft, is not unwise !'"Hazlitt.

THE NUDE FIGURE.

"It is difficult to discover any settled rules of propriety in the different modes of dress, as all ages and nations have fluctuated with regard to their notions and fashions in this matter. The Greek statues of the Laocoon, Apollo, Meleager, Hercules; the Fighting and Dying Gladiator, and the Venus de Medicis, though altogether without drapery, yet surely there is nothing in them offensive to modesty, nothing immoral: on the contrary, looking on these figures, the mind of the spectator is taken up with the surprising beauty or sublimity of the personage, his great strength, vigorous and manly character; or those pains and agonies that so feelingly discover themselves throughout the whole work. It is not in showing or concealing the form that modesty or the want of it depends; that rises entirely from the choice and intentions of the artist himself. The Greeks and other great designers came into this practice (of representing the figure undraped) in order to show in its full extent the idea of character they meant to establish. If it was beauty, they show it to you in all the limbs; if strength, the same; and the agonies of the Laocoon are as discernible in his foot as in his face. This pure and naked nature speaks a universal language, which is understood and valued in all times and countries, where the Grecian dress, language, and manners are neither regarded or known. It is worth observing also that many of the fair sex do sometimes be