been boldly asserted nor fairly admitted; least of all is it likely to be so in these days of despatch and display, where vanity, on the one side, supplies the place of that love of art which is the only effective patronage, and, on the other, that of the incorruptible and earnest pride which no applause, no reprobation, can blind to its shortcomings, or beguile of its hope.

And yet it is in the expectation of obtaining at least a partial acknowledgment of this, as a truth decisive both of aim and conduct, that I enter upon the second division of my subject. The time I have already devoted to the task I should have considered too great, and that which I fear may be yet required for its completion would have been cause to me of utter discouragement, but that the object I propose to myself is of no partial nor accidental importance. It is not now to distinguish between disputed degrees of ability in individuals, or agreeableness in canvasses; it is not now to expose the ignorance or defend the principles of party or person; it is to summon the moral energies of the nation to a forgotten duty, to display the use, force, and function of a great body of neglected sympathies and desires, and to elevate to its healthy and beneficial operation that art which, being altogether addressed to them, rises or falls with their variableness of vigour, now leading them with Tyrtean fire, now singing them to sleep with baby murmurings. Because that with many of us the recommendation of our own favourite pursuits is, I fear, rooted more in conceit of ourselves, than in affection towards others, so that sometimes in our very pointing of the way we had rather that the intricacy of it should be admired than unfolded, whence a natural distrust of such recommendation may well have place in the minds of those who have not yet perceived any value in the thing praised; and because, also, men in the present century understand the word Useful in a strange way, or at least (for the word has been often so accepted from the beginning of time) since in these days they act its more limited meaning farther out, and give to it more practical weight and authority; it will be well in the outset, that I define exactly what kind of Utility I mean to attribute to art, and especially to that branch of it which is concerned with those impressions of external Beauty whose nature it is our present object to discover.

§3. The doubtful force of the

term "utility."

§ 4. Its proper

sense.

§ 5. How falsely applied in these times.

§ 6. The evil consequences of such interpretation how

That is, to everything created, preeminently useful which enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of Man himself.

Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant me this follow me no farther, for this I purpose always to assume) are, to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.

Whatever enables us to fulfil this function is, in the pure and first sense of the word, Useful to us: preeminently therefore, whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist are, in a secondary and mean sense, useful; or rather, if they be looked for alone, they are useless, and worse, for it would be better that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence.

And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands, and food and raiment, were alone useful, and as if Sight, Thought, and Admiration1 were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment than the body, who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that it is to give them wood to hew and water to draw, that the pine-forests cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and the great rivers move like his eternity. And so come upon us that Woe of the preacher, that though God "hath made everything beautiful in his time, also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.”

This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends men to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their national power; struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even

connected with

"We live by admiration, hope, and love." Excursion, book iv.

their disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance, faith; but when they have learned to live under providence of laws and with decency and justice of regard for each other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem to arise out of their rest; evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear, also, a fear greater than of sword and sedition: that dependence on God may be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water sure; that gratitude to Him may cease, because his constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation '; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colours its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which so long as they are torrenttossed and thunder-stricken maintain their majesty, but when the stream is silent, and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them and the lichen to feed on them, and are ploughed down into dust.2 And though I believe that we have salt enough of ardent and § 7. How to be holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety, in all matter however trivial, in all directions however distant.

And at

averted.

1 Rom. xii. 9.

2 I have suffered these passages to remain unaltered, because, though recent events have turned them into irony, they are, perhaps, not undeserving of attention, as having marked, during a period of profound and widely extended peace, some of the sources of the national debasement which, on the continent of Europe, has precipitated its close, and been manifested alike in the dissolution of authority, the denial of virtue, and the unresisted victory of every dream of folly, and every shape of sin.

this time, when the iron roads are tearing up the surface of Europe, as grapeshot do the sea, when their great net is drawing and twitching the ancient frame and strength together, contracting all its various life, its rocky arms and rural heart, into a narrow, finite, calculating metropolis of manufactures; when there is not a monument throughout the cities of Europe that speaks of old years and mighty people, but it is being swept away to build cafés and gaming-houses'; when the honour of God is thought to consist in

The extent of ravage among works of art, or of historical interest, continually committing throughout the continent may, perhaps, be in some measure estimated from the following facts, to which the experience of every traveller may add indefinitely: At Beauvais. The magnificent old houses at the corner of the market-place, supported on columns of workmanship (so far as I recollect) unique in the North of France, have recently been destroyed for the enlarging of some ironmongery and grocery warehouses. The arch across the street leading to the cathedral has been destroyed also, for what purpose I know not.

At Rouen. The last of the characteristic houses on the quay is now disappearing. When I was last there, I witnessed the destruction of the noble Gothic portal of the church of St. Nicholas, whose position interfered with the courtyard of a hotel; the greater part of the ancient churches are used as smithies, or warehouses for goods.

So also at Tours (St. Julien). — One of the most interesting pieces of middle-age domestic architecture in Europe, opposite the west front of the cathedral, is occupied as a café; and its lower story concealed by painted wainscotings, representing, if I recollect right, twopenny rolls surrounded by circles of admiring cherubs.

At Geneva. - The wooden projections or loggias, which were once the characteristic feature of the city, have been entirely removed within the last ten years.

At Pisa.—The old Baptistery is at this present time in process of being "restored,” that is, dashed to pieces; and common stone, painted black and varnished, substituted for its black marble. In the Campo Santo, the invaluable frescoes, which might be protected by merely glazing the arcades, are left exposed to wind and weather. While I was there in 1846, I saw a monument to some private person put up against the lower part of the wall. The bricklayers knocked out a large space of the lower brickwork, with what beneficial effect to the loose and blistered stucco on which the frescoes are painted above, I leave the reader to imagine; inserted the tablet, and then plastered over the marks of the insertion, destroying a portion of the border of one of the paintings. The greater part of Giotto's "Satan before God" has been destroyed by the recent insertion of one of the beams of the roof.

The tomb of Antonio Puccinello, which was the last actually put up against the frescoes, and which destroyed the terminal subject of the Giotto series, bears date 1808. It has been proposed (or at least it is so reported), that the church of La Spina should be destroyed in order to widen the quay.

At Florence. One of its most important and characteristic streets, that in which stands the church of Or San Michele, has been within the last five years entirely destroyed and rebuilt in the French style; consisting now almost exclusively of shops of Bijouterie and Parfumerie. Owing to this direction of public funds, the fronts of the Duomo, Santa Croce, San Lorenzo, and half the others in Florence, remain in their original bricks.

The old refectory of Santa Croce, containing an invaluable Cenacolo, if not by

the poverty of his temple, and the column is shortened and the pinnacle shattered, the colour denied to the casement and the marble to the altar, while exchequers are exhausted in luxury of boudoirs and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without a pause all the loveliness of creation which God in giving pronounced Good, and destroy without a thought all those labours which men have given their lives and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail; there is need, bitter need, to bring back into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to know Him by whom we live; and that He is not to be known by marring his fair works, and blotting out the evidence of his influences upon his creatures; not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which He gave to men of old. He did not

Giotto, at least one of the finest works of his school, is used as a carpet manufactory. In order to see the fresco, I had to get on the top of a loom. The cenacolo (of Raffaelle ?) recently discovered I saw when the refectory it adorns was used as a coachhouse. The fresco which gave Raffaelle the idea of the Christ of the Transfiguration is in an old wood-shed at San Miniato, concealed behind a heap of faggots. In June, 1846, I saw Gentile da Fabriano's picture of the Adoration of the Magi, belonging to the Academy of Florence, put face upmost in a shower of rain in an open cart; on my suggesting the possibility of the rain's hurting it, an old piece of matting was thrown over its face, and it was wheeled away "per essere pulita." What fate this signified is best to be discovered from the large Perugino in the Academy; whose divine distant landscape is now almost concealed by the mass of French ultramarine painted over it, apparently with a common house-brush, by the picture cleaner.

Not to detain the reader by going through the cities of Italy, I will only further mention, that at Padua the rain beats through the west window of the Arena chapel, and runs down over the frescoes. That at Venice, in September, 1846, I saw three buckets set in the Scuola di San Rocco to catch the rain which came through the canvasses of Tintoret on the roof; and that, while the old works of art are left thus unprotected, the palaces are being restored in the following modes. The English residents knock out bow windows to see up and down the canal. The Italians paint all the marble white or cream colour, stucco the fronts, and paint them in blue and white stripes to imitate alabaster. This has been done with Danieli's hotel, with the north angle of the church of St. Mark (there taking the place of the real alabasters which have been torn down), with a noble old house in St. Mark's Place, and with several in the narrow canals. The marbles of St. Mark's, and carvings, are being scraped down to make them look bright; the lower arcade of the Doge's palace is whitewashed; the entrance porch is being restored, the operation having already proceeded so far as the knocking off of the heads of the old statues; an iron railing painted black and yellow has been put round Faded tapestries and lottery tickets (the latter for the benefit of charitable institutions) are exposed for sale in the council chambers.

the court.