pose, which bring before us the eminent and the lovely of his age, as if they had every quality of life save that of movement; yet they seem about to move, having only ceased from moving when we came to look at them. The art of Vandyke is indeed adapted to every capacity: he captivates all beholders by a silent reality, which alike attracts attention and retains it. It may be said of him, that his happy art of portraiture has done more, for one at least of the personages he has painted, than portraiture has done for any one other that ever lived. No one has been ever so rendered by resemblance as Charles I.: of this monarch, the portraits by Vandyke are such perfect likenesses, such truly breathing effigies, that they serve to give more of a posthumous existence to man than had ever been bestowed by any human means before; and these, comparing them with other transcripts, are likenesses which give, what even his enemics allowed him to possess, the grace and dignity of a king and a gentleman. Nor do the fascinations of Vandyke stop with Charles: his queen, Henrietta Maria, has been painted with all the illusion of life; and his children, Charles, Mary, and James, in the separate groups at Windsor and Turin, are painted at that age when the simplicity of inexperience shows them in most engaging contrast with the power of their rank and station, and like the infantas of Velasquez, unite all the demure stateliness of the court, with the perfect artlessness of childhood.

But there is one circumstance connected with the employment of Vandyke in England, showing, however highly he was appreciated, it was only by a part of

the British people, and that the taste for art had not yet become a native feeling. Vandyke painted indeed the Buckinghams, the Arundels, the Straffords, and the Pembrokes; but neither the Hampdens, the Bradshawes, the Fairfaxes, nor any of the leaders of the prevailing party, seem to have had the taste or the desire to employ his pencil. The result of this appears to have been that Painting, which arose from the taste and disposition of the King, was repressed by his troubles, and overthrown by his fall.

Pursuing this a little further, however, it will be found that the rise of art in England at that time had other causes of retardation than the loss-and that was a great one-of so accomplished a patron. High as the excellence was which art had attained in every nation around, and great as the encouragement was which was held out by an influential class in this country, yet there appears to have existed none of the art adapted to the minds of the people at large. The art of Vandyke, high and excellent as it was, was at this period of his life employed by an exclusive society-the court, and the noblesse of the court: unlike those of his earlier time, the same variety of rank and condition of life is no longer to be found among them. He painted not even the learned and ingenious; no head of Wotton or Ben Jonson: the beauties he painted were the beauties of high title, and the manly grace he could so readily bestow was awarded only to the prince, the warrior, or the statesman. The employment of Vandyke, like that of Lely and Kneller in the succeeding reigns, appears, from its very success, to have been

confined to the high but limited sphere of the aristocracy; and while art, in every branch, was at its zenith in the surrounding countries, it is remarkable that in England a hundred years should yet be destined to pass away, before the taste of the people, and the genius of the artists, were prepared for a style new and original, and adapted to the tastes and wants of the island.

With the protection of Charles and the stimulating presence of Rubens and Vandyke, and in an era when Milton and Dryden may be called contemporary, we find not a vestige of any work, foreign or domestic, dedicated to a British scene-a British court-or British history. Yet silent as national art was at a time apparently auspicious for its appearance, still the period passed away, and in course of time another era arrived, when, with out any cause that could be reckoned auspicious, without foreign example or special encouragement, the light of genius-British genius, dawned at last, and art prevailed, through the desire of the people, and the aid of the hitherto unimagined styles of Hogarth, Wilson, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and West.

Art is in every country of slow growth: the art of Britain, like the art of Italy, of Spain, and of Germany, has had, even in recent times, a slow but steady growth; and not arrived at full stature yet, she has, as it were, a new people to inspire-a new and undiscovered world to move in. However slow, and even humble, her progress may be, it is still onward. She is beginning to move the people: she may yet carry them along with her.

SECTION IV.

Historical Painting.

LET us fancy that, in a certain stage in the progress of society, a species of food was brought into fame and use, of the most agreeable qualities, which would as a sustenance contribute to the health and comfort of mankind; and that after long use it should be discovered that this food, however calculated for universal demand, was yet so refined in its composition, and so exquisite in its flavour, that, with the exception of those engaged in its production, none, save a most select portion of society, were from habit and taste fully qualified to enjoy it (withal, accompanied by a complaint of the general insensibility of the public to the excellence of the viands): if we can fancy all this to occur respecting the ordinary wants of life, we may readily imagine the result of the offer of a refined, but exclusive, style of art to the community at large.

Whatever tone of exclusiveness art may be permitted to assume, when long familiar to the favour of the state, it is quite clear that in her stage of infancy and rise, when her powers are humble, and a taste scarcely formed whereby to estimate her strength, she must, to obtain attention, address herself to the untutored ideas natural to every individual at such a period, and thus create a taste and understanding of her powers. If she were to do this, she would soon observe, that, to become useful and popu

lar, she must not shape her taste to suit a party or a class, but adapt it to the tastes and capacities of a whole people.

During the dawn of modern art in Italy, the works of Cimabue and Giotto give proof of this adaptation, like native music, to the humblest comprehension of the multitude: as her powers refined and expanded, the same obviousness of meaning may be observed in her works. In Simone di Martino, Andrea Orcagna, Buonamico Buffalmacco, and Benozzo Gozzoli, whose art was employed in this intellectual age in embodying the leading events of Scripture story, for the use of the ignorant and uninformed classes of their times. These artists, with others of scarcely inferior merit, occupy a space of about two hundred years. They had to re-invent art; to introduce it to the world, and render it acceptable, giving all the interest of a new discovery to every fresh effort of the hand and mind,

Such was the advance of art, accompanied by a corresponding preparation to receive it in the wants and tastes of the people, before the great era of art in Italy arrived: and although the Madonna of Cimabue has been long supplanted in popular admiration by the Madonna of Raphael; although the Job of Giotto and the Last Judgment of Orcagna have been excelled by the similar labours of Michael Angelo; and although The History of Joseph and his Brethren by Gozzoli has been outdone by the school of Athens, and the Heliodorus of a more matured period of art; yet, who is there that cannot see, in those early efforts, the embryo, the first thoughts of the perfected works of which they were the precursors, for the