ate them.
Yet Montesquieu and Winkelmann might have observed that the air of fens
and marshes had not deprived the gross feeders of Holland and Flanders of
admirable artists. We have teen outrageously calumniated. So far from any
national incapacity, or obtuse feelings, attaching to ourselves in respect
to these arts, the noblest efforts had long been made, not only by
individuals, but by the magnificence of Henry VIII., who invited to his
court Raphael and Titian; but unfortunately only obtained Holbein. A later
sovereign, Charles the First, not only possessed galleries of pictures,
and was the greatest purchaser in Europe, for he raised their value, but
he likewise possessed the taste and the science of the connoisseur.
Something, indeed, had occurred to our national genius, which had thrown
it into a stupifying state, from which it is yet hardly aroused. Could
those foreign philosophers have ascended to moral causes, instead
of vapouring forth fanciful notions, they might have struck at the
true cause of the deficiency in our national genius. The jealousy of
puritanic fanaticism had persecuted these arts from the first rise of the
Reformation in this country. It had not only banished them from our
churches and altar-pieces, but the fury of the people, and the "wisdom" of
parliament, had alike combined to mutilate and even efface what little
remained of painting and sculpture among us. Even within our own times
this deadly hostility to art was not extinct; for when a proposal was made
gratuitously to decorate our places of worship by a series of religious
pictures, and English artists, in pure devotion to Art, zealous to confute
the Continental calumniators, asked only for walls to cover, George the
Third highly approved of the plan. The design was put aside, as some had a
notion that the cultivation of the fine arts in our naked churches was a
return to Catholicism. Had this glorious plan been realized, the golden
age of English art might have arisen. Every artist would have invented a
subject most congenial to his powers. REYNOLDS would have emulated Raphael
in the Virgin and Child in the manger, WEST had fixed on Christ raising
the young man from the dead, BARRY had profoundly meditated on the Jews
rejecting Jesus. Thus did an age of genius perish before its birth! It was
on the occasion of this frustrated project that BARRY, in the rage of
disappointment, immortalised himself by a gratuitous labour of seven years
on