. The air is either too bleak, or it is
impure; generally the peasants are exposed to alternations of both.
Great hardship is sustained in various ways, severe labor undergone
during summer, and a sedentary and confined life led during winter.
Where the gloom exists in less elevated districts, as in Germany, I do
not doubt, though I have not historical knowledge enough to prove this,
that it is partly connected with habits of sedentary life, protracted
study, and general derangement of the bodily system in consequence; when
it exists in the gross form exhibited in the manuscript above examined,
I have no doubt it has been fostered by habits of general vice, cruelty,
and dissipation.

[Illustration: FIG. 116.]

Rudeness of life.

Sec. 26. IV. Considered as a natural insensibility to beauty, it is, I
imagine, indicative of a certain want of cultivation in the race among
whom it is found, perhaps without corporal or mental weakness, but
produced by rudeness of life, absence of examples of beautiful art,
defects in the mould of the national features, and such other
adversities, generally belonging to northern nations as opposed to
southern. Here, however, again my historical knowledge is at fault, and
I must leave the reader to follow out the question for himself, if it
interests him. A single example maybe useful to those who have not time
for investigation, in order to show the kind of difference I mean.

Fig. 115 is a St. Peter, from a German fifteenth-century MS., of good
average execution; and Fig. 116 a Madonna, either of the best English,
or second-rate French, work, from a service-book executed in 1290. The
reader will, I doubt not, perceive at once the general grace and
tenderness of sentiment in the lines of the drapery of the last, and
the comparatively delicate type of features. The hardnesses of line,
gesture, and feature in the German example, though two centuries at
least later, are, I think, equally notable. They are accompanied in the
rest of the MS. by an excessive coarseness in choice of ornamental
subject: beneath a female figure typical of the Church, for instance,
there is painted a carcass, just butchered, and hung up with skewers
through the legs.

Sec. 27. V. In many high mountain districts, not only are the inhabitants
likely to be hurt by hardship of life, and retarded by roughness of
manners, but their eyes are familiarized with certain conditions of
ugliness and disorder, produced by t