n? or
the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and
influence, must it be with disdain or with pity? This, as it appears
to me, is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational, as
well as a most irreverent, view of the question: it is to confine
the pleasure and improvement to be derived from works of art within
very narrow bounds; it is to seal up a fountain of the richest
poetry, and to shut out a thousand ennobling and inspiring thoughts.
Happily there is a growing appreciation of these larger principles of
criticism as applied to the study of art. People look at the
pictures which hang round their walls, and have an awakening
suspicion that there is more in them than meets the eye--more than
mere connoisseurship can interpret; and that they have another, a
deeper significance than has been dreamed of by picture dealers and
picture collectors, or even picture critics.--Introd. xxiii.

On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry of Sacred and
Legendary Art. Her first volume contains a general sketch of the
legends connected with angels, with the scriptural personages, and
the primitive fathers. Her second, the histories of most of "those
sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the
first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact
or tradition, has been so disfigured by poetical embroidery that they
have in some sort the air of ideal beings." Each story is followed
by a series of short but brilliant criticisms on those pictures in
which the story has been embodied by painters of various schools and
periods, and illustrated by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts,
which add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work. A
future volume is promised which shall contain the "legends of the
monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and the
Dominicans, considered merely in their connection with the revival
and the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries"--a work which, if it equal the one before us, will
doubtless be hailed by those conversant with that wonderful phase of
human history as a valuable addition to our psychologic and aesthetic
literature.

We ought to petition, also, for a volume which should contain the
life of the Saviour, and the legends of the Virgin Mary; though this
latter subject, we are afraid, will be too difficult for even Mrs.
Jameson's tact and delicacy to make