Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847

While the marriage was on the tapis, the beautiful Sophia was taken ill of the scarlet fever, and Lord Carteret of the gout. Nothing could be less amatory than such a crisis. But his lordship was all gallantry; he corresponded with her, read her letters to the Privy Council, and tired all the world with his passion. At length both recovered, and the lady had all the enjoyments which she could find in ambition. Carteret obtained an earldom, lost his place, but became only more popular, personally distinguished, and politically active. The Countess then became the female head of the Opposition, and gave brilliant parties, to the infinite annoyance of the Pelhams. For a while, she was the "observed of all observers." But her career came to a sudden and melancholy close. She had given promise of an heir, which would have been doubly a source of gratification to her husband; as his son by a former wife was a lunatic. But she was suddenly seized with a fever. One evening, as her mother and sister were sitting beside her, she sighed and said, "I feel death coming very fast upon me." This was their first intimation of her danger. She died on the same night!

Walpole is the especial chronicler of this time. Such a man must have been an intolerable nuisance in his day, but his piquant impertinence is amusing in ours. He was evidently a wasp, pretending to perform the part of a butterfly, and fluttering over all the court flowers, only to plant his sting. As he was a perpetual flirt, he dangled round the Pomfret family; and probably received some severe rebuke from their mother, for he describes her with all the venom of an expelled dilettante.

He speaks of her as all that was prim in pedantry, and all that was ridiculous in affectation; as, on being told of some man who talked of nothing but Madeira, gravely asking, "What language that was;" and as attending the public act at Oxford (on the occasion of her presenting some statues to the University) in a box built for her near the Vice-Chancellor, "where she sat for three days together, to receive adoration, and hear herself for four hours at a time called Minerva." In this assembly, adds the wit, in his peculiar style, "she appeared in all the tawdry poverty and frippery imaginable, and in a scoured damask robe," and wonders that "she did not wash out a few words of Latin," as she used to fricassee French and Italian; or, that "she did not torture some learned simile," as when she said, that "it was as difficult to get into an Italian coach, as it was for Cæsar to take Attica, by which she meant Utica."

But Lady Pomfret is said also to have employed her talents upon more substantial things than pedantry. She had an early intercourse with the immaculate Mrs Clayton, with whom she was supposed to have negotiated the appointment of Lord Pomfret as master of the horse, for a pair of diamond rings, worth £1,400. The rumour appears to have obtained considerable currency; for one day when she appeared at the Duchess of Marlborough's with the jewels in her ears, the Duchess (old Sarah) said to Lady Wortley Montague, "How can the woman have the impudence to go about in that bribe!" Lady Wortley keenly and promptly answered,—"Madam, how can people know where wine is to be sold, unless where they see the sign?"

Another of the curiosities of this court menagerie, was Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham. She was a daughter of James the Second by Katherine Sedley, daughter of the wit, Sir Charles. James, who with all his zeal for popery was a scandalous profligate, and as shameless in his contempt of decent opinion as he was criminal in his contempt for his coronation oath; gave this illegitimate offspring the rank of a Duke's daughter, and the permission to bear the royal arms! She found a husband in the Earl of Anglesea, from whom she was soon separated; the earl died, and she took another husband, John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, certainly not too youthful a bridegroom. The duke, always a wit, had been in early life one of the most dissipated men of his day, and through all the varieties and vexations of a life devoted to pleasure, had reached his 59th year. Yet, this handsome wreck, almost the last relic of the court of Charles the Second, lived a dozen years longer, and left the duchess guardian of his son.

His lordly dowager afforded the world of high life perpetual amusement. Her whole life was an unintentional caricature of royalty. Beggarly beyond conception in her private affairs, she was as pompous in public as if she had the blood of all the thrones of Europe in her veins. She evidently regarded the Brunswicks as usurpers, and hated them; while she affected a sort of superstitious homage for the exiled dynasty, and gave them—every thing but her money. She once made a sort of pilgrimage to visit the body of James, and pretended to shed tears over it. The monk who showed it, adroitly observed to her, that the velvet pall which covered the coffin was in rags, but her sympathies did not reach quite so far, and she would not take the hint, and saved her purse.

At the opera, she appeared in a sort of royal robe of scarlet and ermine, and everywhere made herself so supremely ridiculous, that the laughers called her Princess Buckingham. Even the deepest domestic calamity could not tame down this outrageous pride. When her only son died of consumption, she sent messengers to all her circle, telling them, that if they wished to see him lie in state, "she would admit them by the back stairs." On this melancholy occasion, her only feeling seemed to be, her vanity. She sent to the Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the triumphal car which had conveyed the remains of the great duke to the grave. This preposterous request was naturally refused by the duchess, who replied, "that the car which had borne the Duke of Marlborough's dead body should never be profaned by another."

On her own deathbed, she declared her wish to be buried beside her father James the Second. "George Selwyn shrewdly said, that to be buried by her father, she need not be carried out of England," (she was supposed to be actually the daughter of Colonel Graham.) When she found herself dying, she carried on the melancholy farce to the last. She sent for Anstis, the herald, and arranged the whole funeral ceremony with him. She was particularly anxious to see the preparations before she died. "Why," she asked, "won't they send the canopy for me to see? Let them send it, even though the tassels are not finished." And finally, she exacted from her ladies a promise, that if she became insensible, they should not sit down in the presence of her body, till she was completely dead!

Such things told in a romance, would be criticised for their extravagance, but nothing is too extravagant for human nature. Reared in folly, pampered with self-indulgence, and bloated with vanity, the wholesome discipline of adversity would have been of infinite value to this woman and her tribe. Six months in Bridewell, varied by beating hemp, would have been the most fortunate lesson which she could have received from society.

Another of those persons, yet more remarkable for her position in life, was the second daughter of George II., the Princess Amelia. She was supposed to have been attached to the Duke of Grafton; but remaining single, and having nothing on the earth to do, she became a torment to the King, the Court, and every body. Idleness is the vice of high life, and discontent its punishment. The Princess became proverbial for peevishness, sarcasm, and scandal. Of course, fashion took its revenge; and where every one was shooting an arrow, some struck, and struck deep. The Princess grew masculine in her manners, and coarse in her mind. Her appointment as ranger in Richmond Park, one of those sinecure offices which are scattered among the dependants of the throne, made her enemies. Little acts of authority, such as stopping up pathways, brought the tongues of the neighbouring population and gentry upon her, until her royal highness had the vexation of seeing an action brought against her. After some of the usual delays of justice, she had the mortification of being beaten, and ultimately resigned the rangership. From this period she almost disappeared from the public eye, yet she survived till 1786, dying at the age of 71.

Mrs Clayton still held her quiet ascendancy, and her position was so perfectly understood, that her interest seems to have been an object of solicitation with nearly every person involved in public difficulties. Of this kind was her intercourse with the three sons of Bishop Burnet, all individuals of intelligence and accomplishment, but all in early life struggling with fortune. The character of the bishop himself is best known from his works: gossiping, giddiness, and imprudence in taking every thing for granted that he had heard, but honesty in telling it, belonged to the bishop as much as to his books. The chances of the Revolution placed him in the way of preferment; chances, however, which, if they had turned the other way, might have cost him his head. But he was on the right side in politics, and not on the wrong side in religion; and he won and wore the mitre in better style than any man of his age. His oldest son, William, was educated as a barrister; he lost his fortune in the South Sea bubble, and was sent to America as governor of New York. Subsequently he was removed to Boston, with which he was discontented, and after long altercations with the General Assembly of the province, he died of a fever, probably inflamed by vexation. Gilbert, the second son, was appointed chaplain to George I., was a man of clear understanding, and exhibited his knowledge of courts by siding with Hoadley. With all the distinctions of his profession opening before him, he died young. Thomas, the third son, differed from both his brothers, in the superiority of his talents, and the wildness of his temper. The manners of the time were a mixture of vulgar riot and gross indulgence. The streets were infested with ruffianism, and a society among the young men of rank and education, which took to itself the name of "The Mohocks," and whose barbarous habits were worthy of the name, insulted alike public justice and endangered personal safety. Thomas Burnet was said to have been engaged in some of their violences, though he, perhaps, was not one of the "affiliated." It may be naturally supposed, that those excesses grieved so distinguished a man as his father; and it is equally to be supposed that they led to frequent remonstrance. If so, they operated effectively at last.

One day the bishop, observing the peculiar gravity of his son's countenance, asked, "On what he was thinking."

"On a greater work than your 'History of the Reformation.'—My own," was the answer.

"I shall be heartily glad to see it," said the father, "though I almost despair of it."

It was undertaken, however, and vigorously pursued. The young roué became a leading lawyer, and finally attained the rank of Chief-justice of the Common Pleas. He died in 1753.

There is, perhaps, in public history, no more curious instance of the power which circumstances may place in the hands of a private individual, than the deference paid to Mrs Clayton. Her whole merit seems to have been caution, a perpetual sense of the delicacy of her position, and an undeviating deference to the habits, opinions, and purposes of the Queen. Those were useful qualities, but not remarkable for dignity, and rather opposed to personal amiability of mind. Yet this cautious, considerate, and frigid personage, was all but worshipped by the world of fashion, of talents, and of celebrity.

Among those worshippers was the man who did the most evil, and gained the most renown, of any man of his generation. The wit, who eclipsed all the witty pungency of France in his sportive sarcasm; all the libellers of royalty in his scorn of thrones; and all the grave infidelity of England, in his restless and envenomed antipathy to all religion—the memorable Voltaire.

He was then only beginning his mischievous career, but he had already made its character sufficiently marked to earn an imprisonment in the Bastille, and, on his liberation, an order to quit Paris.

In England he occupied himself chiefly with literature; published his "Henriade," for which he obtained a large subscription; wrote his tragedy of "Brutus," his "Philosophical Letters," and other works.

At length he was permitted to return to that spot out of which a French wit may be scarcely said to live; and kept up his intercourse with Mrs Clayton by the following letter:

    "Paris, April 18, 1729.

"Madame,—Though I am out of London, the favours which your ladyship has honoured me with, are not, nor ever will be, out of my memory. I will remember, as long as I live, that the most respectable lady, who waits, and is a friend to the most truly great queen in the world, has vouchsafed to protect me, and receive me with kindness while I was at London.

"I am just now arrived at Paris, and pay my respects to your Court, before I see our own. I wish, for the honour of Versailles, and for the improvement of virtue and letters, we could have here some ladies like you. You see, my wishes are unbounded. So is the respect and gratitude I am with, Madame, your most humble, obedient servant,

    "Voltaire."

We pass over a thousand triflings in the subsequent pages—the alarms of court ladies for the loss of a royal smile, the sickness of a favourite monkey, or the formidable "impossibility" of matching a set of old china. Such are the calamities of having nothing to do. We see in those pages instances of high-born men contented to linger round the court for life, performing some petty office which, however, required constant attendance on the court circle, and submitting, with many a groan, it must be confessed, to the miserable routine of trivial duties and meagre ceremonial, much fitter for their own footmen; while they left their own magnificent mansions to solitude, their noble estates unvisited, their tenantry uncheered, unprotected, and unencouraged by their residence in their proper sphere, and finally degenerated into feeble gossips, splenetic intriguers, and ridiculous encumbrances of the court itself.

Difficulty seems essential to the vigour of man. Difficulty seems essential even to the vigour of nations. The old theory, that luxury is the ruin of a state, was obviously untrue; for in no condition of the earth could luxury ever go down to the multitude. But the true evil of states is, the decay of the national activity, the chill of the national ardour, the adoption of a trifling, indolent, vegetative style of being. Into this life France had sunk, from the time of Louis XIV. Into this life Germany had sunk, from the peace of Westphalia. Into this life England was rapidly sinking, from the reign of Anne.

But the visitation came at last, at once to punish and to stimulate. France, Germany, and England were plunged into war together; and fearful as the plunge was, out of that raging torrent the three nations have struggled to shore, refreshed and invigorated by the struggle. England seems now to be entering on another career, more perilous than the exigencies of war—a moral and intellectual conflict, in which popular passions and rational principles will be ranged on opposite sides; and the question may involve the final shape which government shall assume in the British empire, or, perhaps, in the European world.

The characteristics of our time are wholly unshared with the past. In calling up the recollections of the great ages of English change, we can discover but slight evidence of their connexion with our own. To the stately, but religious, aspect of the Republic of 1641, we find no resemblance in the general features of our religious tolerance. To the ardent zeal for liberty which marked the Revolution of 1688, we can find no counterpart in the constitutional quietude of the present day. The fiery ferocity of Continental Revolution has certainly furnished no model to the professors of national regeneration, since the reform of 1830. And yet, a determination, a power and a progress of public change, is now the acknowledged principle of the most active, indefatigable, and unscrupulous portion of the mind of England.

And among the most remarkable and most menacing adjuncts of the crisis, is the singular sense of inadequacy to resist its career, which seems to paralyse the habitual defenders of the right cause. The consecrated guardians of the church seem only to wait the final blow. The great landholders in the peerage are contented with making protests. The agricultural interest, the boast of England, and the vital interest of the empire, has abandoned a resistance, too feeble to deserve the praise of fortitude, and too irregular to deserve the fruits of victory. The moneyed interest sees its gigantic opulence threatened by a hundred-handed grasp; but makes no defence, or makes that most dangerous of all defences, which calls in the invader as the auxiliary, bribes him with a portion of the spoils, and only provokes his appetite for the possession of the whole.

This condition of things cannot last. A few years, perhaps a few months, will ripen the bitter fruit, which the meekness of undecided governments has suffered to grow before their eyes. The Ballot, which offers a subterfuge for every fraud; Extended Suffrage, which offers a force for every aggression; the overthrow of all religious endowments, which offers a bribe to every desire of avarice—above all that turning of religion into a political tool, that indifference to the true, and that welcoming of the false, in whatever shape it may approach, however fierce and foul; however coldly contemptuous, or furiously fanatical, however grim or grotesque, whose first act must be to trample all principle under foot, and place on its altar the worship of the passions;—those are the demands which are already made, and those will be the trophies which the hands of political zealotry and personal rapine, in the first hour of their triumph, will raise on the grave where lies buried the Constitution.

Yet nothing is done by the natural defenders of the rights of Englishmen. No leader comes forward; no new followers are to be found; no banner is raised as the rallying point for the fugitives, already broken. We see the approach of the evil, as the men of the old world might have seen the approach of the Deluge; awaiting with folded hands, and feet rooted to the ground, the surges which nothing could resist; looking with an indolent despair at the mighty inundation, before which the plain and the mountain alike began to disappear; and sullenly submitting to an extinction, of which they had been long offered the means of escape, and perishing, with the pledge of security floating before their eyes.

We are by no means desirous of being prophets of public misfortune; but, with the tenets publicly avowed, in the elections which have just closed, with the strong popularity attached to the most daring opinions, with thirty pledged Repealers from Ireland, with the wildest doctrines of trade advocated by the popular representatives in England, with sixty subjects of the Pope sitting in a Protestant legislature, and with the evident determination to bring into that legislature individuals (and who shall limit their numbers, when its doors are once thrown open to their wealth?) who pronounce Christianity itself to be an imposture,—we can conjecture no consequences, however hazardous, which ought not to present themselves to the soberest friend of his country. That the worst consequences may not be inevitable, is only to hope in a higher protection; that even out of the evil good may come, is not unconformable to the ways of Providence; but that times are at hand in which the noblest energy of English statesmanship will be required to meet the conflict, we have no more doubt, than that the pilot who, in a storm, uses neither compass nor sail, must run his ship on shore; or that the man who walks about in clothes dipped in pestilence, will leave his corpse as a testimony to the fact of the contagion.

ART IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN AGES.[19 - Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Christlichen Völkern. Von Gottfried Kinkel.]

From time immemorial the German universities have been regarded as the seats of patient, persevering, indefatigable, but also unprofitable, erudition. They have been the homes of men whose lives were one long day of toil—a continual course of labour, the sole reward of which was a secret consciousness of worth, and a fame, circumscribed it is true, yet still spreading wide amongst the elect of science in all civilised countries. Lost, not in the day-dreams of romance, but in the depths and amongst the mazes of science, it was but seldom that these men of the study and the library found leisure and nerve to escape from seclusion, and to take their share of the duties of active life in which their less reflective brethren were feverishly engaged. And when they attempted the competition, their failure was signal. They presented an extraordinary exhibition of awkward genius and blundering sagacity, and exposed themselves at once to the painful ridicule of those whose calling and pursuits taught them to prize mere worldly wisdom above all human lore.

Their country owes them a heavy debt of gratitude. Though little known, they ought never to be forgotten. They were unpopular, but they worked for the popularity of science. The results of their labours are not to be looked for in their own creations, but must rather be traced in the productions of their children's children. Generations to come will acknowledge them for their lawful progenitors, nor will future ages lose by confessing the obligations which they owe to so noble an ancestry. If our task to-day is comparatively easy, it is because the men of whom we speak never shrank from the difficulties attending theirs. We may smile at the childish simplicity of Neander, but we deeply venerate the profound erudition and the subtle discernment of that extraordinary critic's mind. We may feel shocked at the clownish sallies of a Blumenbach, the stinginess of Gesenius, and the rude manners of Ernesti. But with the first, we connect vast realms in natural philosophy unconquered before him; to the second, the student of Hebrew refers with reverential affection and gratitude; whilst we know, that the burly demeanour of the last could never hide the treasures of a Latin style, which, for purity and power, competes with that of Tully, and like that may well be compared to a precious sword, pure in metal, and as lasting as it is flexible and cutting.

The greater number of those to whom we refer have long since passed from the silence of their study to that of the grave. They have died as they lived—poor and honoured. Of them all, there is scarcely one whose departure was generally lamented; not one whose death was generally known. For the bulk of mankind, they never existed. Their works, unpalatable to the many, had always been the delight and instruction of the few. Yet, let not their unpopularity be quoted against them. They knew the extent of their mission. It was to collect and hoard bullion for future coinage and circulation. They prepared the path along which a whole nation was hereafter to travel. They were modest but meritorious labourers, who built a massive and powerful foundation, that another age might be left at ease to erect the brilliant superstructure.

That other age is here. The proud fane for which they cleared the way, and saw as the prophet of old beheld the Land of Promise, is rising now before us. In the author of the "History of the Fine Arts in the Early Ages of Christianity," we greet a worthy follower of those great masters whose works have somewhat rashly been pronounced more curious than useful. Professor Gottfried Kinkel is a true disciple and no imitator. He understands the period which has produced him. He knows its wants. General diffusion of knowledge is its distinguishing feature. Science leaves the closet to communicate her benefits to the forum. Neither the centralisation of wealth, nor that of knowledge, can now secure a nation against poverty and ignorance. People may starve, though the royal coffers are bursting with their weight of gold; they may be ignorant, though their chiefs luxuriate in the possession of unbounded knowledge. Rapid circulation of the currency has been found to constitute national wealth. A general diffusion of knowledge is the necessary condition of civilisation. Poesy is no longer content to dwell at court. Chemistry has chosen the path which Bacon pointed out to her; and whilst she has found a new field of action, has been enriched by treasures of knowledge hitherto concealed from her view. The sneering exclamation of Persius—

"Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter."

is the great truth and motto of this our century.

Even the universities of Germany have begun to popularise the results of their laborious researches; although it cannot be said that they have taken the lead of the age, we may at least affirm that they have gone along with it. They have not lingered in the rear. They have adapted their instruction and language to homely understandings, and have increased rather than lessened their dignity by the condescension. They have become more honoured and respected as the benefits of their labours have grown more palpable to common sight; they have been more renowned since the many have been permitted to appreciate the merits of the few. Instruction itself has been more courted and made more welcome since it took courage to cast aside its cumbrous wig and gown, and ventured to appear before the world with the natural graces of pure humanity.

Professor Kinkel, to whom we owe the work whose title is placed at the foot of the present article, is in every respect a specimen, and perhaps a prototype, of the German professor of the nineteenth century. To the deep and solid learning of a former generation, he adds the good taste and social accomplishments indispensable in these more advanced times. Thirteen years ago he was a student of theology in the university of Bonn, and even at that period the extraordinary application and the commanding faculties of the "studiosus Kinkel" had earned for him a scholastic reputation, and won the respect of his fellow-students and of the professors of the university. Indefatigable, then, in his theological pursuits, he was the subject of general admiration on account of the vast extent of his acquirements, and of the enthusiastic interest with which he engaged in the sacred study of the fine arts. No less general was the complaint that a mind so happily formed to range through the boundless realms of philosophy, a genius so brilliant, a soul so deeply imbued with a love of the beautiful and the great, should be suffered to pine beneath the monotonous duties of a theological professorship, and dissipate unparalleled energies in splitting the straws of a controversy, or deciding the dusty quibbles of an antiquated lore. At the close of his academical career, Gottfried Kinkel was admitted into the university as a licentiate in theology; but shortly after his promotion, he quitted his native country, and was for some years a wanderer amongst the splendid ruins of Italy. The treasures of art which mock the nakedness of this ill-starred country were to him what they are ever to the mind of the artist,—they revealed a new world. Unlike many others, however, Kinkel was not bewildered by the beauty which so suddenly burst upon his view. He was not surfeited. His enthusiasm, tempered by the metallic reasoning of the Hegel school, was closely allied with the subtlest criticism. His admiration was never an obstacle to comparison. Whilst he admired he remembered: individual faults or excellencies, he found to be reducible to common causes. His conclusions he drew from the objects: he did not force the one upon the other.

In like manner, and intent upon the same purpose, the theological licentiate travelled through France, Belgium, and Holland; and when he returned to Bonn, his spirit as well as his habits of life were more than ever wedded to the critical contemplation of the results of the creative faculty in the mind of man. The annual exhibitions of paintings in Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Frankfort, found in him an indulgent and impartial critic. His researches on the monuments of ancient sacred architecture were at intervals published in The Domban Blatt, and immediately secured the attention and regard of all antiquarians.

The cherished pursuits, however, were ill calculated to reconcile Kinkel to his adopted profession. In 1845, the licentiate in theology doffed his gown, and was forthwith appointed a professor of philosophy in the university of Bonn. It is to his lectures in this capacity that we owe the treatise on Art in the Early Christian Ages. This remarkable book was written with the purpose of instructing the public mind, and of enabling the many to participate in the intellectual enjoyment as yet confined to a favoured few. Its objects were to vindicate the merits of Christianity as a fosterer of the arts, and to encourage, all lovers of art by opening new fields for exploration.

The productions of real art are the most universally instructive of all creations. Nothing acts so powerfully on individual and national character; nothing so beneficially. Wherever art has been without these consequences, we may be sure that art was false. Its prophets were false prophets. The assumption of charlatans, however, is no condemnation of the art itself. The abuses of idolaters is no argument against religion. M. Kinkel's introduction to the plan of his work has but one fault. It is a national one. His mode of reasoning is conclusive; but the English reader, less accustomed to metaphysical phraseology than his German neighbours, will find some difficulty in grasping it. According to our author, two conditions are necessary to true art, which he defines to be "the incorporation of the spirit in a beautiful form." Beauty, then, and spirit are, the two conditions of true art. If one be wanting, true art is likewise wanting. The spirit, separate from beauty of form, may be religion and ethics—it can never be art. Beauty of form without the spirit, is likewise not a work of art. It remains on a level with matter; but the production of the artist soars higher. Hence true art is capable of yielding more universal satisfaction both to the artist and to the spectator than all other intellectual creations. The reason is obvious. We express and meet with the two grand constituents of our being; and, whilst other branches of knowledge are apter to separate than to unite—whilst science is exclusive, and even religion herself is sometimes productive of discord, true art asserts her right to be regarded as the great Pantheon of mankind. No idea is universal property unless expressed by art. Even the vast abyss which separates the lower orders of men from the ranks above them is overcome by art, for all are sensible of the joys which art produces. To know, therefore, what and how the mind and hand of man have hitherto worked, is a necessary, if it be not an indispensable, investigation and pursuit. "We are not ambitious," says M. Kinkel, "to conquer fame by profound hypotheses concerning things which, both by time and place, are indeed far from us. It is not our object to look for art in its infancy amongst nations which have long ceased to exist, nor shall we at once turn to Greece and Rome. Our desire is to contemplate those creations, which from their time and spirit are kindred to our feelings, and to speak of that branch of art with which Christianity has been busy within the last eighteen hundred years."

The author proceeds to point out the two grand directions in which all original art branches off. It serves either religion or history. The first productions of art were idols and monuments. Palaces, theatres, paintings, are the work of progressive civilisation. Christian art has one principal feature in common with pagan art,—its origin. They are alike the offspring of religion. They are also similar in their progress; they acquired an inclination towards history, and both have at last taken a decided realistic direction. But the vast difference between Christian and antique art is no less palpable. The art of antiquity was far more deeply imbued with the principle of nationality than the former. Nations were isolated; each had its proper gods and its peculiar history. The diversity of religion and of political institutions engendered a difference of feeling. This civilised world of ours, on the other hand, has a community of feeling, in as much as it has one religion common to all. The Celtic, Sclavonian, and German nations exhibit far greater diversities of origin and climate than the inhabitants of Persia and India in ancient times; yet the artistic productions of the former are more alike. Their religion furnishes one point at which all meet, and in respect of which they are inseparable. The prevalence of the ecclesiastical element in modern art, is, however, liable to one great objection. For many years it served to exclude historical art, which even in our own time has not attained so high a perfection. It is true that Christianity makes amends in some degree for the want of this historical development. A total absence of historical facts is the great characteristic of the religions of antiquity. The Son of David, on the contrary, is in himself the greatest of historical facts. The Apostles are no mythical personages. The great men of Judaic history, the family of our Saviour, and the people with whom he conversed, all form one large group of historical personages, and religion and history, formerly separated, are here united. Christ on the cross is an object of touching adoration, but he is also the monument of the greatest event in the history of the world. But that this is no national history is undeniable. Offspring of a foreign soil, it had no connexion with the state.

The exclusively ecclesiastical character of early Christian art, is another grand feature which at once destroys all analogy between this art and the creations of pagan antiquity. In Hellenic paganism, we behold the triumph of humanity. The human form in its most ideal beauty is the type of all things divine. Christianity starts at once with the peremptory condition of a renunciation of individual beauty and strength. Christianity counted sensual beauty as nothing: she regarded the mind alone. She permits the human form only as the incorporation of some hidden thought divine. In the one instance, the form was all in all; in the other, it is the expression. The heathen delighted in naked bodies, for every single part might convey the sensation of beauty. The face sufficed for Christian art, as solely expressive of divine beauty. And since the adopted Jewish custom excludes nudity in life, it must needs die in art. In the new order of things, sculpture is lost, and painting is better adapted to the narrow limits of early Christian art.

Upon the question whether this fear of the world, as exhibited in the rejection of the world's material forms, be truly the character of real Christianity, Professor Kinkel answers with a decided negative. He rather favours the opinion of those who hold the fear and hate of the world which distinguished the early Christian ages, to have been founded on an erroneous comprehension of the doctrine and example of the great Founder, who, as far as we are able to learn, facilitated the creation of real art. The misconception, so fatal to the civilising influence of art, M. Kinkel, explains by reminding us of the fears of idolatry, so justly entertained by Christianity in its first existence, of the oppression and persecution which the early church experienced, and of the natural desire entertained by the oppressed, to be as little like the oppressors as possible.

The extreme opinions, however, could not last. They began with the fury of persecution, and they died with it. An earnest admiration of the beautiful is implanted deeply in the soul of man for noble purposes, which Providence will not suffer to be thwarted. Mistaken notions of duty, religious zeal maddened by oppression, for a time clouded the faculty amongst the early Christians, but it soon burst forth again. Faint at first in its appearance, it gained strength with every passing lustre; and however sweeping the condemnation pronounced by early believers against vain signs and images expressive of the objects of this fleeting world, the voices of the cursers gradually hushed, and the mind of man, asserting its prerogative, was active again with new and regenerated power. The history of civilisation must needs count by centuries, and it took ages to effect the transition. From our present lofty and unprejudiced height, from that height at which modern art strives to emulate that of antiquity, it may not be wholly uninstructive to look back towards the first trembling attempts of the early Christian people.

It would appear that the first attempts of the early Christians were of a symbolical and allegorical kind. The same figures, with little or no variation, were constantly repeated to express ideas which, whilst they led the thoughts of the believer into the channel which to him appeared most satisfactory, were mere forms, and void of meaning to pagan eyes. Chief amongst these was the Cross, but without the body of Christ affixed to it. The crucifix is an invention of the seventh century. In the beginning, the Cross did not expose the Christians to suspicion, for it was known to many religions of antiquity. The nations of Egypt adored the cross as a sign of their salvation, since they placed it in the hands of one of their idols as a key to the annual flux of the Nile. The Persian worshippers of Mithras considered the cross a sacred symbol. When pagan persecution finally discovered the exclusive and peculiar signification of the sign amongst the Christians, the latter ingeniously contrived forms of the cross translatable by the eyes of the elect alone. To these, the image of a flying bird was a cross; the human figure in a swimming attitude was the same thing, and so also the cross-trees of a sailing ship; the letters Α and Ω are seen frequently engraved at the extremities of these disguised emblems in remembrance of Revelation, i. 8. Doves, ships, lyres, anchors, fishes and fishermen, are recommended by Clemens Alexandrinus, as the most fitting objects for Christians to contemplate, and for representation on seals. Amongst other symbols we find the seven-branched chandelier, though originally a Jewish sign, employed as a type of our Saviour, who calls himself (John, viii. 12.) the "light of the world." A wreath of flowers was expressive of the crown of life. A pair of scales, in remembrance of the last judgment, and a house, have been occasionally discovered on ancient grave-stones; and once, a simple curriculum has been traced with the pole thrown backwards and a whip leaning against it,—an unmistakable allusion to a departure for that place where "the weary are at rest." Amongst plants, the olive, the vine, and the palm were favourite symbols, the latter being generally reserved for the grave-stones of martyrs. Birds, too, are frequently met with on the walls of houses: the phœnix and the peacock being emblems of immortality. The fable of the phœnix is minutely told by Clemens Romanus; but the common superstition which ascribes imputrescibility to the flesh of the latter, easily rendered this bird a symbol of the resurrection of the body. Saint Augustine is said to have subjected this peculiar quality of the peacock's flesh to a practical test. He ordered one to be roasted, and at the close of a twelvemonth requested it to be served up. Tradition does not inform us whether he ate it, and with what appetite.

The dove occurs more frequently than any other bird. Two doves bearing olive branches, are seen on Christian grave-stones in the Cologne museum, and on the porta nigra at Treves. The meaning of the sign of a fish will not readily occur: but the frequency of its appearance establishes its character as a secret mark of recognition. It was used to signify both Christ and his church. Of quadrupeds we find the stag,[20 - Psalm xlii. 1.] the ox,[21 - 1 Cor. ix. 9.] the lion,[22 - Rev. v. 5.] and the lamb,[23 - John, i. 29, and Rev. v. 6.] constantly in connexion with the cross. The lion and the lamb are typical of Christ. The transition to his representation in human form is rendered by two figures, which, whilst human, are still symbolical. In the catacombs of Saint Calintus, in the Via Appia at Rome, Christ is discovered in the character of Orpheus, whilst at other places he is represented as a shepherd.