e, principally of a fanciful and allegorical kind, and
never had the meek Mary been so decked out with earthly ornament
as in their church pictures. If the sanctification of simplicity,
gentleness, maternal love, and heroic fortitude, were calculated
to elevate the popular mind, the sanctification of mere glitter and
ornament, embroidered robes, and jewelled crowns, must have tended
to degrade it. It is surely an unworthy and a foolish excuse that, in
thus desecrating with the vainest and most vulgar finery the beautiful
ideal of the Virgin, an appeal was made to the awe and admiration
of vulgar and ignorant minds; for this is precisely what, in all
religious imagery, should be avoided. As, however, this sacrilegious
millinery does not come within the province of the fine arts, I may
pass it over here.

Among the Jesuit prints of the seventeenth century, I remember one
which represents the Virgin and Child in the centre, and around are
the most famous heretics of all ages, lying prostrate, or hanging by
the neck. Julian the Apostate; Leo the Isaurian; his son, Constantine
Capronymus; Arius; Nestorius; Manicheus; Luther; Calvin:--very
characteristic of the age of controversy which had succeeded to the
age of faith, when, instead of solemn saints and grateful votaries, we
have dead or dying heretics surrounding the Mother of Mercy!

* * * * *

After this rapid sketch of the influences which modified in a general
way the pictures of the Madonna, we may array before us, and learn to
compare, the types which distinguished in a more particular manner the
separate schools, caught from some more local or individual impulses.
Thus we have the stern, awful quietude of the old Mosaics; the hard
lifelessness of the degenerate Greek; the pensive sentiment of
the Siena, and stately elegance of the Florentine Madonnas; the
intellectual Milanese, with their large foreheads and thoughtful eyes;
the tender, refined mysticism of the Umbrian; the sumptuous loveliness
of the Venetian; the quaint, characteristic simplicity of the early
German, so stamped with their nationality, that I never looked round
me in a room full of German girls without thinking of Albert Durer's
Virgins; the intense life-like feeling of the Spanish; the prosaic,
portrait-like nature of the Flemish schools, and so on. But here an
obvious question suggests itself. In the midst of all this diversity,
these ever-changing influences, was