costume, considered with reference to art. It has
never been more accurately observed than in the present day; art has
become a slop-shop for pedantic antiquities. This is because we live
in a learned and critical, but by no means poetical age. The ancients
before us used, when they had to represent the religions of other
nations which deviated very much from their own, to bring them into
conformity with the Greek mythology. In Sculpture, again, the same
dress, namely, the Phrygian, was adopted, once for all, for every
barbaric tribe. Not that they did not know that there were as many
different dresses as nations; but in art they merely wished to
acknowledge the great contrast between barbarian and civilized: and
this, they thought, was rendered most strikingly apparent in the
Phrygian garb. The earlier Christian painters represent the Savior,
the Virgin Mary, the Patriarchs, and the Apostles in an ideal dress,
but the subordinate actors or spectators of the action in the dresses
of their own nation and age. Here they were guided by a correct
feeling: the mysterious and sacred ought to be kept at an
awe-inspiring distance, but the human cannot be rightly understood if
seen without its usual accompaniments. In the middle ages all heroical
stories of antiquity, from Theseus and Achilles down to Alexander,
were metamorphosed into true tales of chivalry. What was related to
themselves spoke alone an intelligible language to them; of
differences and distinctions they did not care to know. In an old
manuscript of the _Iliad_, I saw a miniature illumination representing
Hector's funeral procession, where the coffin is hung with noble coats
of arms and carried into a Gothic church. It is easy to make merry
with this piece of simplicity, but a reflecting mind will see the
subject in a very different light. A powerful consciousness of the
universal validity and the solid permanency of their own manner of
being, an undoubting conviction that it has always so been and will
ever continue so to be in the world--these feelings of our ancestors
were symptoms of a fresh fulness of life; they were the marrow of
action in reality as well as in fiction. Their plain and affectionate
attachment to everything around them, handed down from their fathers,
is by no means to be confounded with the obstreperous conceit of ages
of mannerism, for they, out of vanity, introduce the fleeting modes
and fashion of the day into art, because to them every