nal mind, has given his attention to what seems to me one of the
most singular phenomena in the history of Europe,--the pause of the
English and French in pictorial art after the fourteenth century. From
the days of Henry III. to those of Elizabeth, and of Louis IX. to those
of Louis XIV., the general intellect of the two nations was steadily on
the increase. But their art intellect was as steadily retrograde. The
only art work that France and England have done nobly is that which is
centralized by the Cathedral of Lincoln, and the Sainte Chapelle. We
had at that time (_we_--French and English--but the French first) the
incontestable lead among European nations; no thirteenth-century work in
Italy is comparable for majesty of conception, or wealth of imaginative
detail, to the cathedrals of Chartres, Rheims, Rouen, Amiens, Lincoln,
Peterborough, Wells, or Lichfield. But every hour of the fourteenth
century saw French and English art in precipitate decline, Italian in
steady ascent; and by the time that painting and sculpture had developed
themselves in an approximated perfection, in the work of Ghirlandajo and
Mino of Fesole, we had in France and England no workman, in any art,
deserving a workman's name; nothing but skilful masons, with more or
less love of the picturesque, and redundance of undisciplined
imagination, flaming itself away in wild and rich traceries, and crowded
bosses of grotesque figure sculpture, and expiring at last in barbarous
imitation of the perfected skill and erring choice of Renaissance Italy.
Painting could not decline, for it had not reached any eminence; the
exquisite arts of illumination and glass design had led to no effective
results in other materials; they themselves, incapable of any higher
perfection than they had reached in the thirteenth century, perished in
the vain endeavor to emulate pictorial excellence, bad _drawing_ being
substituted, in books, for lovely _writing_, and opaque precision, in
glass, for transparent power; nor in any single department of exertion
did artists arise of such calibre or class as any of the great Italians;
and yet all the while, in literature, _we_ were gradually and steadily
advancing in power up to the time of Shakespere; the Italians, on the
contrary, not advancing after the time of Dante.

Sec. 24. Of course I have no space here to pursue a question such as this;
but I may state my belief that _one_ of the conditions involved in it
was the mountai