ters
before Albert Durer, which makes the specific difference, evident to
every boy, between the drawing of the Teutonic and Italian schools?

But if so, what becomes of the theory which calls Pagan art by all
manner of hard names? which dates the downfall of Christian art from
the moment when painters first lent an eye to its pernicious
seductions? How can those escape the charge of eclecticism, who,
without going to the root-idea of Greek art, filched from its outside
just as much as suited their purpose? And how, lastly, can M. Rio's
school of critics escape the charge of Manichean contempt for God's
world and man, not as ascetics have fancied him, but as God has made
him, when they think it a sufficient condemnation of a picture to
call it naturalistic; when they talk and act about art as if the
domain of the beautiful were the devil's kingdom, from which some few
species of form and elements were to be stolen by Christian painters,
and twisted from their original evil destination into the service of
religion?

On the other hand, we owe much to those early ascetic painters; their
works are a possession for ever. No future school of religious art
will be able to rise to eminence without taking full cognisance of
them, and learning from them their secret. They taught artists, and
priests, and laymen too, that beauty is only worthy of admiration
when it is the outward sacrament of the beauty of the soul within;
they helped to deliver men from that idolatry to merely animal
strength and loveliness into which they were in danger of falling in
ferocious ages, and among the relics of Roman luxury; they asserted
the superiority of the spirit over the flesh; according to their
light, they were faithful preachers of the great Christian truth,
that devoted faith, and not fierce self-will, is man's glory. Well
did their pictures tell to brutal peasant, and to still more brutal
warrior, that God's might was best shown forth, not in the
elephantine pride of a Hercules, or the Titanic struggles of a
Laocoon, but in the weakness of martyred women, and of warriors who
were content meekly to endure shame and death, for the sake of Him
who conquered by sufferings, and bore all human weaknesses; who "was
led as a lamb to the slaughter, and, like a sheep dumb before the
shearer, opened not his mouth."

We must conclude with a few words on one point on which we differ
somewhat from Mrs. Jameson--the allegoric origin of certain l