e, from all the peculiarities of national
taste; they are purified from all the peculiarities of local
circumstances; they have been rescued from that inevitable degradation
to which art is uniformly exposed, by taste being confined to a limited
society; they have assumed, in consequence, that general character,
which might suit the universal feelings of our nature, and that
permanent expression which might speak to the hearts of men through
every succeeding age. The admiration, accordingly, for those works of
art, has been undiminished by the lapse of time; they excite the same
feelings at the present time, as when they came fresh from the hand of
the Grecian artist, and are regarded by all nations with the same
veneration on the banks of the Seine, as when they sanctified the
temples of Athens, or adorned the gardens of Rome.

Even the rudest nations seem to have felt the force of this impression.
The Hungarians and the Cossacks, as we ourselves have frequently seen,
during the stay of the allied armies in Paris, ignorant of the name or
the celebrity of those works of art, seemed yet to take a delight in the
survey of the statues of antiquity; and in passing through the long line
of marble greatness which the Louvre presents, stopt involuntarily at
the sight of the Venus, or clustered round the foot of the pedestal of
the Apollo;--indicating thus, in the expression of unaffected feeling,
the force of that genuine taste for the beauty of nature, which all the
rudeness of savage manners, and all the ferocity of war, had not been
able to destroy. The poor Russian soldier, whose knowledge of art was
limited to the crucifix which he had borne in his bosom from his native
land, still felt the power of ancient beauty, and in the spirit of the
Athenians, who erected an altar to the Unknown God, did homage in
silence to that unknown spirit which had touched a new chord in his
untutored heart.

* * *

From the impression produced on our minds by the collection in the
Louvre, we were led to form some general conclusions concerning the
history and object of the arts of Painting and Sculpture, which we shall
presume to state, as what suggested themselves to us on the
contemplation of the greatest assemblage of the works of art which has
ever been formed; but which we give, at the same time, with the utmost
diffidence, and merely as the result of our own feelings and
reflections.

The character of art in every country appears