Bastiat said of a book destined to live, that it should not contain a word that was not weighed. Its contents should be formed like a crystallisation, drop by drop, and, like that also, in silence and darkness. It was in silence that he indited his • Harmonies.' His voice had left him, and impeded respiration and other difficulties followed. In the spring of 1850 he sought the waters of the Pyrenees with no success. Later in the year the doctors sent him to Pisa, and thence to Rome, where he died on December 24, aged forty-nine. He had been born a Catholic, and in that confession he died. I dis'cuss no dogma,' he said, 'I accept it. In looking round me I see that the most enlightened nations are Christian, and I ' am glad to be in communion with this portion of the human 'race.' The last word that could be caught from his lips was la Vérité.' He had been no less in a general than in a special application the faithful votary of truth, and had given all he had to her service and that of his country.

The man who preaches a new doctrine, in whatever form, cannot expect early recognition, and accordingly the respect of that small section of French society who adopt his views only found expression last April-twenty-eight years after his death-in a modest statue erected to his memory in the little town of Mugron.

It is quite natural that in a country like Germany, where the functions of true national liberty have still to be developed, a period of commercial depression should suggest no other remedy to a semi-absolute Government than that which will be only an aggravation of the very ill. Nor is it unnatural that even in England the temporary distress of a large class should be attributed by some persons to that policy of free trade in which we stand almost isolated. More than thirty years have elapsed since the great battle of free trade was fought, and, as we thought, won for ever, in this country. That interval of time has been one of unequalled national prosperity, due, in great measure, to the principles of Adam Smith and the policy of Sir Robert Peel. But error, based on selfinterest, is not so easily extirpated. At the first check given to the progress of the nation the old fallacies leap once more into light, and we are reminded that they are addressed to a generation of men who only know of the triumph of free trade as an historical event, and who are not familiar with the process of reasoning by which it was accomplished. Strange as it would appear to the men of 1846, the cause of free trade might be endangered even here if it rested on the crude opinions of the uneducated classes. It will be saved by the

convictions of statesmen who, whether free-traders or Protectionists of old, are now unanimously pledged and determined to persevere in the true principles of public economy. It is not, therefore, to them, but ad populum, that the foregoing remarks are addressed. We will not yield the welfare of the country to a popular delusion; and we hold it to be a duty to endeavour to make the arguments in favour of freedom of trade intelligible to the simplest capacity. For this reason we have now reverted to the subject. The causes of evils are least discernible by the masses suffering under them, and history is read in vain unless it teach us how wide of the mark have been the reasons assigned by popular panic in times of public visitation. "The question of free trade is, next to the Reformation, next to the question of free religion, the most 'momentous that has ever been submitted to human decision.' These were the words of Nassau Senior more than fifty years ago, and time, far from changing, has only confirmed their truth. Nations,' as Mr. Bright writes to his American friend, learn slowly, but they do learn.' The period is therefore sure to come in the progress of the world when protection and restrictions in commerce will be considered as barbarous and ineffectual for the true welfare of a country as the application of the rack was for the true confession of crime.

ART. V.-The Ancient Sculptures in the Roof of Norwich Cathedral, which exhibit the Course of Scripture History from the Creation to Solomon, and from the Birth of Christ to the Final Judgment, described and illustrated by EDWARD MEYRICK GOULBURN, D.D., Dean of Norwich, and HENRY SYMONDS, M.A., Rector of Tivetshall. To which is added A History of the See of Norwich from its Foundation to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, by EDWARD MEYRICK. GOULBURN, D.D., and EDWARD HAILSTONE, Esq., jun. London and Norwich: 1876.

THERE

HERE are few subjects of which the great mass of educated Englishmen exhibit more profound ignorance than the history of art in their own country. Side by side with a dilettantism which can discover something to admire in the earliest efforts of semi-barbaric painters and sculptors at Byzantium or at Arles, and cherishes the rudiments of art in Italy or Belgium, there is a disposition to treat early English art as a superficial gentleman of the last century treated mediæval learning, when he said he knew nothing of those

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ages which knew nothing;' though, as was shrewdly retorted, it was difficult to understand how he came to know so curious and important a fact about ages of which he knew nothing.' There is a certain want of patriotism in the contemptuous way men speak of our native art, as though it were something not worth the trouble of research. They seem to imagine there never was an English painter before Lely or an English sculptor before Chantrey. Even our glorious medieval architecture is vaguely supposed to be in some way or other the result of foreign schools-a view strongly combated by M. Viollet le Duc. Our monumental brasses, we are constantly assured, are Flemish, although the more they are compared with Belgian workmanship the more evident does the difference between the one and the other appear. The tapestry that remains to us here and there is allowed to exhibit some evidences of English looms; but as for the glass, that, we are told, all came from Venice or Lorraine. Yet, as early as the reign of Henry III., the Vitrarius is an officer in the royal household. A century later one Nicholas Hoppwell is empowered to lay his hands upon all the glass he could find in the counties of Norfolk, Northampton, Leicester, and Lincoln, and to impress all the glaziers' as well within liberties 'as without, saving the fee of the Church;' and in another fifty years, John Prudde, who had succeeded Roger Gloucester as King's glazier, contracted to glaze the windows of the Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick, though in this case it is true that the terms of his contract, which debarred him from using any glass of England,' prove that though English glass existed, it was held by the fastidious in but light esteem.

That there was an enormous aggregate of art treasures gathered together in our ecclesiastical buildings when the hordes of iconoclasts were let loose among them in the sixteenth century, no one would now dispute; that for centuries vast sums had been spent upon the ornamentation of cathedrals, and churches, and chapels, and shrines, no one doubts. But how this taste for art should have continued to exist as a mere exotic-should have gone on satisfying the demand for works of art at so vast and lavish an expenditure, without creating anything like a home market; how the daily and hourly contemplation of forms of loveliness should have failed to awaken the passion to imitate, perhaps to surpass; how the creative faculty should never have been aroused when the aesthetic instinct was so prodigally appealed to; or how the intelligent foreigner' should have been allowed to have it all his own way, and the Englishman-never too fond of the alien-should

have been content to leave to him all the glory, and the joy, and the solid profits which, confessedly, the artist has at all times received among us-these are questions which do not seem to have occurred to people to ask. The truth is, that until a man has achieved for himself a reputation which separates him from the multitude, we find it hard to believe in him. To some among us it seems a thing not so much incredible as inconceivable that there ever should have been a time when land was owned and cultivated in common. We look with disdain upon any work which is the result of joint authorship. We expect a man to assert himself who is good for anything, and what we cannot tabulate as the product of a single mind, and connect with the sound of a single name, for the most part loses its intrinsic value in our eyes. Put a name on a picture, and it sells. Describe it as of the Venetian school' or the Spanish school,' or by any other such indefinite term, and it hangs heavily on a dealer's hands.

It is because we know so little of the personal history of English artists before the seventeenth century-because their very names have passed away-that we find it difficult to believe there could have been among them men of real genius, or to bestow upon their creations a due amount of patient attention and study. If only some English Vasari could tell us here and there a trifling incident in their lives, we should be far more ready to pay a fabulous price for their works. But as it is, that which comes down unconnected with any distinct personality seems in some measure shut off from our sympathy by the misty veil of an unknown past.

There is another reason for our ignorance of early English art. The tremendous magnitude of that catastrophe known as the suppression of the monasteries' has up to the present moment been very inadequately estimated. The frightful pillage not only of abbeys and priories and convents and chantries, but of churches and colleges and chapels and shrines, went on for eighteen years, and only came to an end when nothing more was left to be seized and destroyed, and was so sweeping and thorough that it effected a complete solution of continuity in English art.

Talk as we please of the Elizabethan literature, the Elizabethan age knew nothing, and cared nothing, for art. It is to the Stuarts we owe the true English Renaissance. than half a century the very traditions of art in Great Britain were forgotten. How could it have been otherwise? Leaving the monasteries out of account, the ecclesiastical corporations and the parish churches throughout the length

and breadth of the land were at once schools and libraries and picture-galleries and museums. Untold and incalculable treasures were assembled within those buildings (themselves in many cases miracles of artistic skill, the despair of architects of a later age); the goldsmith's craft has never surpassed the delicate workmanship of those jewelled chalices, and crosses, and reliquaries; every rood-screen had its carved work, on which the artificer had devoutly striven to spend his best efforts to the glory of God and Mother Church. Pictured saints with their conventional symbols appeared upon the panels in robes of gorgeous colour, though it may be sometimes with hands and feet grotesquely out of drawing. Vestments, whose splendour the moderns examine with envy, dazzled the eyes of rustics in country villages as they knelt before the altars-the very walls were covered with frescoes, often rude and almost barbaric, but which yet were better than bare'ness,' and served to train the eye and the taste by impressions of colour and form. When the robbers were let loose upon this immense accumulation of treasure, the havoc was all the more ruthless because they did not know what to do with it; the market was soon glutted, and there was actually no place for the spoil. Domestic architecture, in the first half of the sixteenth century, was in its infancy in England. The houses of the wealthy burghers in the towns were rarely large or substantial. In the country, the squire's hall was usually constructed of timber; only the very wealthiest nobles thought of building of stone or even brick. The mansions of the laity in England at the time of the suppression could certainly not have contained the plunder of the monasteries. A huge proportion of it must simply have been given to the flames. The artist's vocation was gone. But, until this devastation swept over the land, art culture in England was far more generally diffused, and painting and sculpture had for ages been practised with far more assiduity and with far greater success than is usually supposed; and it is quite time for us to investigate more reverently and more intelligently than heretofore the vestiges of our early art which still remain, though they be mere footprints on the sands of time.'

By a curious coincidence, at the moment when these reflections were suggested to us by the sculptures in Norwich Cathedral, we receive from a parish church in a remote part of Western England fresh evidence of the great perfection the arts of ecclesiastical decoration had attained in the fifteenth century on the eve of the Reformation. The Rector of Plymtree, Devon, has just given to the world a monogram