tern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of
the regardless crowd. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and
has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety
had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast
departing--and forever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene
in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of
modernization. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and
the characters of Venice, Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day
to a lifeless extension of those of Paris and Birmingham. A few lusters
more, and the modernization will be complete: the archaeologist may still
find work among the wrecks of beauty, and here and there a solitary
fragment of the old cities may exist by toleration, or rise strangely
before the workmen who dig the new foundations, left like some isolated
and tottering rock in the midst of sweeping sea. But the life of the
middle ages is dying from their embers, and the warm mingling of the
past and present will soon be forever dissolved. The works of Prout, and
of those who have followed in his footsteps, will become memorials the
most precious of the things that have been; to their technical value,
however great, will be added the far higher interest of faithful and
fond records of a strange and unreturning era of history. May he long be
spared to us, and enabled to continue the noble series, conscious of a
purpose and function worthy of being followed with all the zeal of even
his most ardent and affectionate mind. A time will come when that zeal
will be understood, and his works will be cherished with a melancholy
gratitude when the pillars of Venice shall lie moldering in the salt
shallows of her sea, and the stones of the goodly towers of Rouen have
become ballast for the barges of the Seine.

SIR JOSHUA AND HOLBEIN.[22]

149. Long ago discarded from our National Gallery, with the contempt
logically due to national or English pictures,--lost to sight and memory
for many a year in the Ogygian seclusions of Marlborough House--there
have reappeared at last, in more honorable exile at Kensington, two
great pictures by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two, with others; but these alone
worth many an entanglement among the cross-roads of the West, to see for
half an hour by spring sunshine:--the _Holy Family_, and the _Graces_,
side by side now in the principal room. Great, as ever was work wrought