mohair, or silk; but flowers, fruit, and birds of gorgeous plumage, lions, tigers, and giraffes, grow daily beneath their hands; and very pretty they are. We have watched their progress many a time. We can remember, too, when the cozy parlour of a country inn, or the triangular sanctum of a respectable shopkeeper, was never without some garniture of this kind, with the fair artist's name (generally a pretty name) ingeniously interwoven. We think, by the way, that Delia, and Daphne, and Strephon, with all the paraphernalia of Cupids, arrows, crooks, and sheep, never look so natural as when stitched in worsted. Needlework is the pastoral poetry of design. A snug room hung round with tapestry is the truest Arcadia.

But we loiter in these bypaths and flowery lanes-fugit irreparabile tempus-it is past twelve, and we are still in the 14th century. If you please, we will pass on to the year 1526, when Holbein arrived in England; and for the first time our dear little isle entertained a great painter. He was a native of Basle; but finding the salubrious influences of native air counteracted by an over-rating wife and an under-rating public, he came to the court of bluff King Harry. His first English patron was the Earl of Arundel a title to which art owes something, and chronology more.

Hans is commonly regarded as a literal prosaic portrait-painter, who drew correctly what he saw, but saw only with every-day eyes, and made a dead map of the human countenance,-devoid of all that makes beauty charming, or irregularity characteristic. Those who have seen his" Dance of Death," will not readily believe that he wanted invention. He who could impart expression to a skull, and intellectual interest to all varieties of corruption, could scarce be a mechanical matter-offact person. Neither is it true that his portraits are without meaning, though they may not be distinguished for grace. They are like what his sitters for the most part were, and were content to be representedkings, queens, lords, and ladies, not divinities, nor very amiable men and women. But when he had a worthy subject, he could do ample justicewitness his Sir Thomas More, in

whom he has combined, what seldom meet, regular beauty, with the cast of thought, dignity with benevolence, the air of rank with the stamp of individuality. It is beautifully engraved in Southey's Colloquies, and is very like the apparition. Hans did not flatter Henry, whom he has made as fat, sensual, cruel, and clever, as the life itself; he could flatter, however, as King Harry found in the case of Anne of Cleves, whose Teutonic bulk drew forth that wellknown exclamation of the Defender of the Faith, which proves that kings were less courteous in days of yore than at present; a Flanders mare had been too good a wife for him. He had good brains, however, and knew something of value, if the following anecdote be true: "One day, while the artist was painting in private the portrait of a favourite lady for the king, a great lord unexpectedly found his way into the chamber. The painter, a brawny, powerful man, and somewhat touchy of temper, threw the intruder down stairs, bolted the door, ran to the king by a private passage, fell on his knees, asked for pardon, and obtained it. In came the courtier, and made his complaint. By God's splendour,' exclaimed the king, 'you have not to do with Hans, but with me. Of seven peasants I can make seven lords, but I cannot make one Hans Holbein.'' It is traditionally asserted that Henry employed Holbein to paint the por traits of the fairest young ladies in his kingdom, that in case of the queen patient playing the provoked wife, he might go and choose from his gallery. There is no knowing what such a king might do,-but what need of portraits, when he could command the originals?

·

The love of title and precedence is the besetting sin of womanhood, but surely no good woman would willingly have been Henry's wifeeven to be England's queen? Bluebeard, or the Sultan Schahriar, or the Prince of Camboy, "who nightly stinks a queen to death," would have been a preferable spouse.

Holbein died of the plague in 1554. Allan has thought it worth while to tell us, that he wrought with the left hand. He is perfectly right,-let the left hand not lose the credit of so much excellence.

"He had a strong frame, a swarthy sensual face, and a neck like a bull." His works were once more numerous in England than at present; some were destroyed during the civil wars, some sold abroad by the Puritan Parliament, and many perished when Whitehall was burned. That his portraits are stiff, is historically a merit-they represent folks that had nothing easy about them. With such costumes, such morals, such politics, and such religion, what could people be but stiff? The gradual influence of truth, liberty, and Christian charity, were needed to give elasticity to the limbs, and play to the features.

It is no trivial circumstance in the history of art to record how artists were paid. Allan, we think, is wrong in supposing that the arts were necessarily in a low condition, when some artists were paid by the square foot. Duodecimals are not more arbitrary than popular taste. Many have been the painters who would have rejoiced to be remunerated by so equitable a standard. Besides, the instances he produces refer chiefly to the ornamenting of public buildings, painted windows,&c.which have ever been consigned to the trading branch of the profession. Paint ers are, and always were, better paid than poets. Trading painters and trading authors can only expect to receive value for quantity. Literature is not universally degraded because certain penmen are recompensed at the rate of a penny a-line; and are not splendid articles written monthly for ten and even five guineas per sheet ?

Of King Henry's personal taste, we have a fair sample in the written instructions which he left for his own monument. "The King shall appear on horseback, of the stature of a goodly man, while over him shall appear the image of God the Father holding the King's soul in his left hand, and his right hand extended in the act of benediction." The whole was to be of bronze, and the blasphemous absurdity was actually commenced. It is hardly candid to attribute to the parsimony of Elizabeth, the non-completion of such an insult to piety and

common sense.

"Painting maintained its place in popular estimation during the brief

and guilty reign of Mary." Its place in popular estimation was probably low enough-the Romanist thought it mechanical, and the Protestant damnable. "Sir Antonio More received from Philip for his portrait of the Queen a chain of gold, with the more substantial addition of L.400 a-year as painter to the King." If Sir Antonio painted the traditional likeness of bloody Mary, he was no flatterer. She is old and ugly enough for a frontispiece to the Book of Martyrs. Mr Cunningham has doubtless sufficient vouchers for his facts; but one would scarce have suspected Philip of loving his wife well enough to give away chains for her vinegar features; and if Sir Antonio received L.400, he was better paid than he could possibly deserve. Holbein's pension was only two hundred florins.

How happy had it been for Mary had she died a nun, or sunk uncrowned beneath the weight of royal sorrow! The comfort of a worse than widowed mother-the duteous daughter of a father who disowned and bastardized her, the devoted confessor of an oppressed and plundered church, she had been a saint to the generous Protestant no less than to the sympathizing Catholic, had her rival's success consigned her to the cloister, or the overthrow of her religion to a grave. The Princess Mary had been consecrated to memory had the Queen Mary never reigned. Sir Antonio seems to have loved the savour of human sacrifice, for he accompanied Philip to Spain, and subsequently held an office under the Duke of Alva, whose favour he conciliated by portraits of favourite ladies-no solitary instance of the Miltonic juxtaposition of "lust and hate." At length he betook himself to the receipt of custom in West Flanders, and forsook an art to which he was probably no ornament.

Advancing to the golden days of good Queen Bess, we feel as one that, after long wandering in the uncertain twilight of a subterraneous ruin, and guessing at the mutilated images and outworn inscriptions, steps at once into cheerful day, and hails familiar forms of living beauty. We hear our own language-we find ourselves among men of like passions as ourselves. The age of Cressy and

Poitiers, of Langland, Gower, and Chaucer, was the Soobhi Kazim of England, that premature and shortlived dawn which the fanciful Persian ascribes to the sun's peeping through a hole in Mount Caucasus which but forebodes and typifies the real daybreak. An interim of deep and perilous darkness ensued-the unseen righteousness of heaven made human wickedness perform the needful work which good men cannot do. The strongholds of iniquity were shaken by the gloomy earthquake; and then, the pure light that sets not till even-that shall not set till angels sing the vespers of this earth-came forth in power and glory. Happier days have been before and since, than the days of Elizabeth. Much as we owe to the men of her time, it was no time to make us murmur at that irrevocable decree beyond the power of Jove to alter, which forbids the past to return. It was a time to think, to dream, to read of not to live in. But it is doubtful whether any period since the flood has been so favourable to the developement of the poetic imagination. It was the true age of chivalry. Chivalry never existed but in the imaginations of poets, and in the noble desires of men who aspired to realize the inventions of the poets. The Chevalier Bayard and Sir Philip Sidney were only a more rational kind of Quixotes-men brave by nature, actuated by impulses unconsciously imbibed from romantic fiction, who had conceived an idea, and died in the attempt to make it an historic fact. But chivalry was only one element in the orb of poetry. Religion had made every man think of himself-of himself not only as a living, but as an immortal being. It had given an import to every motion, every throb of the individual heart. Character, which among the ancients was ever deemed a defect, a falling away from the standard of abstract humanity, a theme of ridicule, the proper staff of satire and comedy, assumed a tragic dignity; it was seen that each man involves in his own peculiar nature a distinct ideal-and that the perfection of one is no more the perfection of another, than the beauty of the lily is the beauty of the cedar. Yet, amid all this diversity of ministrations, this endless va

riety of hue and lineament, religion taught, confirmed, and consecrated the mighty truth, that " one touch of nature makes the whole world kin." The daily goings on of our business and bosoms began to partake of that interest which of old pertained only to those massy operations, in which the bulk of mankind are and can be no more than blind agents or passive sufferers. The kindly affections which, according to the Houyhnm philosophy of the heathens, and the Manichean dogmas of the monks, were at best but tolerated weaknesses or venial sins, were sublimed to holy duties; and human creatures, heretofore considered but as the perishing moments composing the permanent being of a commonwealth, discovered in themselves a principle of duration, compared to which the boasted solidity of states and institutions was a vain and a fleeting thing. The controversies of the time, how ever profitless in themselves, gave a strength, an agility, a subtle and penetrative quality to thought, which— now no longer hermetically sealed up in axioms, definitions, and formal aphorisms-resumed its natural intercourse with the visible and the sentient. The reciprocal influences of intellect and feeling displayed themselves in act and in speech-in prose and in poetry. Nor was this era less opulent in the matériel of imagination, than potent in the mo rale. The imposing ceremonial of the Romish church, though banished and forbidden, yet lingered in the regret of many, and in the memory of all. The mask and antique pageantry, the allegorical and symbolical spirit of the middle age, still remained to be immortalized by Spenser. The classes, degrees, and voca tions of society were still marked by the picturesque and dramatic distinctions of dress and manner, while the ambitious affectation and ungainly mimicry of the mounting commonalty were endless topics of humour and ridicule.

The splendid apparel, the metaphoric euphuism, the new-fangled oaths, and elaborate gallantry of the young courtiers, who bore their manors on their back, and wasted their sleepless wits to coin new compliments; the grave splendour, the crafty wisdom, the sententious speech, and politic

piety of the sage statesman; the precise, square-cut, taciturn regularity of the smooth-pated, velvet-capped citizen; the nicked-bearded, huffing, hectoring, basket-hilted adventurer; the traveller with his foreign phantasies, and unheard-of wonders, best believed when he was lying, and often discredited when he told the truth; the country gentleman who had newly stepped into the place of a thinned and impoverished baronage; the idolized, but not yet enfranchised females, in whose wardrobe was no middle state between velvet and homespun woollen, in whose education no mean betwixt the erudition of a divine and the ignorance of a household drudger, either calculated to govern a kingdom, or simply fit "to suckle fools and chronicle small fees:"-these, and a hundred antics beside, not forgetting the all-licensed fool, that excellent substitute for a free press, made the world a mask of all professions-a gay and gorgeous procession of fancy costume. Add to this, that two-thirds of the planet, with numberless varieties of men, and much that was vast, magnificent, beautiful, rich, and strange by land or sea, were but just disclosed to Europe by voyagers and pilgrims, whose personal deeds and sufferings outdid romance, and made impossibility seem light work. Natural philosophy, too, had much of the sentimental and inysterious character which accords with poetry. Enough of real science mingled with it to draw respect to the superstitious alloy, which wrought on the hopes and fears of the many. Astrology walked hand in hand with astronomy; and the chemists besought the spirits of the elements to impart to their occult and suspected enquiries, the elixir of life, and the transmuting stone. At once dupes and deceivers, they pretended to secrets which they knew that they did not possess, and to extract from less learned fools, the means of performing their costly and endless researches, ever fancying that the present experiment would make them masters of the earth. How large a field of allusion was supplied by the mystic properties, signatures, antipathies, and sympathies of stones and plants, by planetary hours, and

stellar configurations? The heart and passions of men entered into every pursuit; even the barren, unfeeling lines of the mathematician were interested with human fate, and abstract numbers were powerful over happiness and misery. It is needless to remark how much true science is indebted to these fancies. We speak of their value to the imagination, for the poet Dee was a better stargazer than Herschel, and Paracelsus a far greater chemist than Sir Humphry Davy. The quacks of that day spiritualized every thing. Those of our times are the earthiest of all materialists.

The lore of Greece and Rome, the beautiful shapes of the old mythology, which have lately been re-admitted to verse, contributed not a little to the rich fancies of our earlier bards. They were not, then, polluted by Cockneyism, or worn out by school versifiers, nor staled by loveless loveditties, and laureate raptures uninspired by loyalty—they had all the freshness of novelty, and the weighty reverence of age and association.

The more recent literature of Spain, Italy, and France, was also rife in England. Our poets borrowed much. What they deemed excellent they made their own with Roman boldness. What was good was not spoiled to make it original; for there were no reviewers in those days,-none of those indefatigable bookworms, who would wade through the dullest folio in search of stolen goods; and, to convict a contemporary of plagiarism, would even read their Bible.

The sex and character of Elizabeth herself was no weak ingredient in the poetic spirit of the time. Loyalty and gallantry blended in the adoration paid her; and the supremacy which she claimed and exercised over the church, invested her regality with a sacred unction that pertained not to feudal sovereigns. It is scarce too much to say, that the Virgin-queen appropriated the Catholic honours of the Virgin Mary. She was as great as Diana of the Ephesians. The moon shone but to furnish a type of her bright and stainless maidenhood. To magnify her greatness, the humility of courtly adulation merged in the ecstasies of Platonic love. She was

charming by indefeasible right;-a jure divino beauty. Her fascinations multiplied with her wrinkles, and her admirers might have anticipated the conceit of Cowley

"The antipevistoisis of age

More inflamed their amorous rage." It is easy for a Whig, or a Puritan, or any other unimaginative blockhead, to cry out against all this, as nauseous flattery, and assert that after all she was rather an unpoetical personage than otherwise-a coarse-minded old maid, half prude, half coquette, whose better part was mannish, and all that belonged to her sex a ludicrous exaggeration of its weaknesses. But meanwhile, they overlook the fact, that not the woman Elizabeth, but the Virginqueen, the royal heroine, is the theme of admiration. Not the petty virtues, the pretty sensibilities, the cheap charity, the prim decorum, which modern flatterers dwell upon, degrading royalty, while they palaver its possessor, but Britannia's sacred majesty, enshrined in chaste and lofty womanhood. Our ancestors paid their compliments to sex or rank-ours are addressed to the person. There is no flattery where there is no falsehood-no falsehood where there is no deception. Loyalty of old was a passion, and passion has a truth of its own-and as language does not always furnish expressions exactly adapted, or native to the feeling, what can the loyal poet do, but take the most precious portion of the currency, and impress it with the mint-mark of his own devoted fancy? Perhaps there never was a more panegyrical rhymer than Spenser, and yet, so fine and ethereal is his incense, that the breath of morning is not more cool and salutary.

"It falls me here to write of Chastity
That fayrest virtue, far above the rest,
For which what needs me fetch from Faery,
Forreine ensamples it to have exprest,
Sith it is shrined in my soveraine's brest,
And form'd so lively on each perfect part,
That to all ladies, who have it profest,
Needs but behold the pourtraict of her part,
If pourtray'd it might be by any living art;
But living art may not least part expresse,
Nor life-resembling pencil it can paint,
All it were Zeuxis or Praxiteles

His dædale hand would faile and greatly faynt,

And her perfections with his error taynt; Ne poet's wit that passeth painter farre In picturing the parts of beauty daynt," &c. But neither Zeuxis nor Praxiteles were called from the dead to mar her perfections, or record her negative charms. Poetry was the only art that flourished in the Virgin reign. The pure Gothic, after attaining its full efflorescence under Henry VII., departed, never to return. The Grecian orders were not only absurdly jumbled together, but yet more outrageously conglomerated with the Gothic and Arabesque. "To gild refined gold-to paint the lily," was all the humour of it. A similar inconsistency infected literature. The classic and the romantic (to use those terms, which, though popular, are not logically exact) were interwoven. The Arcadia and the Fairy Queen, are glorious offences, which "make defect perfection." Perhaps, Shakspeare's "small Latin, and less Greek," preserved him from worse anachronisms than any that he has committed. Queen Bess's patron. age was of the national breed: she loved no pictures so well as portraits of herself. As, however, her painters have not flattered her, it may not uncharitably be concluded that they were no great deacons in their craft. It is a much easier thing to assure a homely female, in prose or rhyme, that she is beautiful, than to represent her so upon canvass. Her effigies are, I believe, pretty numerous, varying in ugliness, but none that I have seen even handsome -prettiness, of course, is out of the question. She was fond of finery, but had no taste in dress. Her ruff is downright odious; and the liberal exposure of her neck and bosom any thing but alluring. With all her pearls about her, she looks like a pawnbroker's lady bedizened for an Easter ball, with all the unredeemed pledges from her husband's shop. She seems to have patronised that chimera in the ideal or allegorical portrait, at which Rubens and Sir Joshua were so often doomed to toil. She would not allow a shadow in her picture, arguing, like a Chinese, or a chop-logic, that shade is only an accident, and no true property of body.