ged to present other
paintings; and four other artists were afterwards added to the number.
But the trustees of the building--Cornwallis, Archbishop of Canterbury,
and Terrick of London--disapproved. Terrick was especially hostile to
the idea, and when the Dean waited upon him and told him, with some
exultation, of the progress that had been made, put an absolute veto
upon the whole project. 'My good Lord Bishop of Bristol,' he said, 'I
have been already distantly and imperfectly informed of such an affair
having been in contemplation; but as the sole power at last remains with
myself, I therefore inform your lordship that, whilst I live and have
the power, I will never suffer the doors of the metropolitan church to
be opened for the introduction of Popery into it.'[934]

Bishop Newton says, in his 'Memoirs,' that though there were some
objectors, opinion was generally in favour of the offer made by the
Academy, and that some churches and chapels adopted the idea. But St.
Paul's probably suffered no loss through the further postponement of the
decorations designed for it. In the first place, paintings--for these,
rather than frescoes, appear to have been intended--were not the most
appropriate kind of art for such an interior. Besides this, those
'earthly charms and graces,' which made Reynolds' style such an
abomination to the delicate spiritual perceptions of the artist-poet
Blake,[935] were by no means calculated to create any elevated ideal
among his countrymen of what Christian art should be. And if the
President of the Academy, the most renowned English painter of his age,
was scarcely competent to such a work, what must be said of his proposed
coadjutors? 'I confess,' said Dean Milman, 'I shudder at the idea of our
walls covered with the audacious designs and tawdry colouring of West,
Barry, Cipriani, Dance, and Angelica Kauffman.'[936] Such criticism
would be very exaggerated if it were understood as a general
condemnation of painters, whose merits in their own province of art were
great. But it will universally be allowed that not to them, and scarcely
to any other painters of the eighteenth century, could we look for the
grandeur of thought or the elevated sentiment which an undertaking of
the kind proposed so specially demanded.

Puritanism had been very destructive of the glass paintings which had
added so much glory of colour to mediaeval churches. The art had begun to
decline, from a variety of causes, at