haracter, are rapid
endeavours to express for themselves, and convey to others, some
likeness of the realities of sacred event in which they had been
instructed. They differ from every archaic school of former design
in this evident correspondence with an imagined reality. All previous
archaic art whatsoever is symbolic and decorative--not realistic. The
contest of Herakles with the Hydra on a Greek vase is a mere sign that
such a contest took place, not a picture of it, and in drawing that
sign the potter is always thinking of the effect of the engraved
lines on the curves of his pot, and taking care to keep out of the
way of the handle;--but a Saxon monk would scratch his idea of the
Fall of the angels or the Temptation of Christ over a whole page of
his manuscript in variously explanatory scenes, evidently full of
inexpressible vision, and eager to explain and illustrate all that he
felt or believed.

Of the progress and arrest of these gifts, I shall have to speak in my
next address; but I must regretfully conclude to-day with some brief
warning against the complacency which might lead you to regard them
as either at that time entirely original in the Saxon race, or at the
present day as signally characteristic of it. That form of complacency
is exhibited in its most amiable but, therefore, most deceptive guise,
in the passage with which the late Dean of Westminster concluded his
lecture at Canterbury in April, 1854, on the subject of the landing of
Augustine. I will not spoil the emphasis of the passage by comment as
I read, but must take leave afterwards to intimate some grounds for
abatement in the fervour of its self-gratulatory ecstasy.

"Let any one sit on the hill of the little church of St. Martin, and
look on the view which is there spread before his eyes. Immediately
below are the towers of the great abbey of St. Augustine, where
Christian learning and civilization first struck root in the
Anglo-Saxon race; and within which now, after a lapse of many
centuries, a new institution has arisen, intended to carry far and
wide, to countries of which Gregory and Augustine never heard, the
blessings which they gave to us. Carry your view on--and there
rises high above all the magnificent pile of our cathedral, equal
in splendour and state to any, the noblest temple or church that
Augustine could have seen in ancient Rome, rising on the very ground
which derives its consecration from him. And still more than the