builder, Archbishop
Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the
crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political
life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to
whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among
the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round
the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop
Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for
line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I
instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as
an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on,
and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in
the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home
to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age
of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the
close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept
away.

It was with a letter from Erasmus in his hands that Hans Holbein stood
before the aged Archbishop, still young as when he sketched himself at
Basel with the fair, frank, manly face, the sweet gentle mouth, the
heavy red cap flinging its shade over the mobile, melancholy brow. But
it was more than the "seventy years" that he has so carefully noted
above it that the artist saw in the Primate's face; it was the still,
impassive calm of a life's disappointment. Only ten years before, at the
very moment when the painter first made his entry into Basel, Erasmus
had been forwarding to England the great work in which he had recalled
theologians to the path of sound biblical criticism. "Every lover of
letters," the great scholar wrote sadly, after the old man had gone to
his rest,--"Every lover of letters owes to Warham that he is the
possessor of my 'Jerome';" and with an acknowledgment of the Primate's
bounty such as he alone in Christendom could give the edition bore in
its forefront his memorable dedication to the Archbishop. That Erasmus
could find protection for such a work in Warham's name, that he could
address him with a conviction of his approval in words so bold and
outspoken as those of his preface, tell us how completely the old man
sympathized with the highest tendencies of the New Learning.

Of the Renascence, that "new birth" of the wor