Steele, speaking, in one of his papers in the 'Guardian,' of Raphael's picture of our Saviour appearing to His disciples after His resurrection, makes some remarks upon religion and sacred art. 'Such endeavours,' he says, 'as this of Raphael, and of all men not called to the altar, are collateral helps not to be despised by the ministers of the Gospel. All the arts and sciences ought to be employed in one confederacy against the prevailing torrent of vice and impiety; and it will be no small step in the progress of religion, if it is as evident as it ought to be, that he wants the best sense a man can have, who is cold to the "Beauty of Holiness." ' ' Tillotson, and other favourite writers of Steele's generation, had dwelt forcibly, and with much charm of language, upon the moral beauty of a virtuous and holy life. But there had never been a time when the English Church in general, as distinguished from any party in it, had cared less to invest religious worship with outward circumstances of attractiveness and beauty. As to the particular point which gave occasion. to Steele's remarks, whatever might be said for or against the propriety of painting in churches, there was in his time little disposition to open the question at all. One of the very few instances where a painting of the kind is spoken of, was connected with a very discreditable scandal. At a time when party feeling ran very high, White Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough, the well-known author of the 'Parochial Antiquities,' had made himself exceedingly obnoxious to some of the more extreme members of the High Church section, by his answer to Sacheverell's sermon upon 'false brethren.' 3 Dr. Walton, Rector of Whitechapel, put up at this juncture in his church a painted altar-piece in representation of the Last Supper, with Bishop Kennet conspicuous in it as Judas Iscariot. To make it the more sure, he had the doctor's great black patch put under his wig upon the forehead.' It

rounded by cedar work, in the wall over the Communion Table.-T. Bartlett's Memoirs of Bishop Butler, 91, 155.

Guardian, No. 21, April 4, 1713.

2 There were, however, some who put up pictures about the altar, and defended their use as the books of the vulgar'-Life of Bishop Kennet, in an. 1716, 125. Lathbury's History of the Nonjurors, 256.

Diary of Mary Countess Cowper (1714-20), pub. 1864, 92; and Life of Bishop White Kennet, 1730, 141–2.

need hardly be added that the Bishop of London ordered the picture to be taken down.1

Sir Christopher Wren had intended to adorn the dome of St. Paul's with figures from sacred history, worked in mosaic by Italian artists. He was overruled. It was thought unusual, and likely also to be tedious and expensive. But there were some who cherished a hope that some such embellishment was postponed only, not abandoned. Walter Harte, for example, the Nonjuror, in his poem upon painting, trusted that the cold north' would not always remain insensible to the claims of religious art. The time would yet come when we should see in our churches,

Above, around, the pictured saints appear,

and when especially the metropolitan cathedral would be
radiant with the pictorial glory which befitted it.

Thy dome, O Paul, which heavenly views adorn,
Shall guide the hands of painters yet unborn;
Each melting stroke shall foreign eyes engage,
And shine unrivalled through a future age.3

The question was brought forward in a practical shape in
1773. Two years earlier the State apartments at old Somerset
Palace had been granted by the King to the Royal Academy.
The chapel was included in the gift; and it was soon after
suggested, at a general meeting of the society, 'that the place
would afford a good opportunity of convincing the public of
the advantages that would arise from ornamenting churches
and cathedrals with works of art.' 4 This proposal was
highly approved of by the society, and many of its members
at once volunteered their services. Their president, however,
Sir Joshua Reynolds, proposed a bolder scheme. He thought
they should undertake St. Paul's Cathedral.' The amend-

A very different anecdote may be told of an altar-piece in St. John's College, Cambridge. 'At Chapel,' wrote Henry Martyn, in 1800, 'my soul ascended to God; and the sight of the picture at the altar, of St. John preaching in the wilderness, animated me exceedingly to devotedness to the life of a missionary.'Journal, &c., ed. by S. Wilberforce, quoted in Bartlett's Memoirs of Bishop Butler, 92.

ment was carried unanimously. Application was accordingly made to the Dean and Chapter, who were pleased with the offer. Dean Newton, Bishop of Bristol, a great lover of pictures, was particularly favourable to the scheme, and warmly advocated it.' Sir Joshua promised 'The Nativity;' West offered his picture of Moses with the Laws;' Barry, Dance, Cipriani, and Angelica Kauffman engaged 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.' 2

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,3 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

VOL. II.

1 Bishop Newton's Life and Works, 1787, i. 142–4.

2 Memoir, &c. i. 225.

3 Alex. Gilchrist's Life of W. Blake, i. 96.

F F

of West, Barry, Cypriani, Dance, and Angelica Kauffman.'' Such criticism would be very exaggerated if it were understood as a general condemnation of painters, whose merits in their own provinces 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 mediaval churches. The art had begun to decline, from a variety of causes, at the beginning of the Reformation. In Elizabeth's reign, few coloured windows of any note were executed. Under James I. and Charles I. the taste to some degree revived. A new style of colouring was introduced by Van Linge, a skilful Flemish artist, who appears to have settled in England about 1610, and found many liberal patrons. It was an interval when much activity was displayed throughout the kingdom in the work of repairing and beautifying churches. When he died, or left the country, the art became all but dormant. The Restoration did little to resuscitate it. Religious taste and feeling were at a low ebb. Not only in England, but throughout the Continent also, the glass painters had no encouragement, and were continually obliged to maintain themselves by practising the ordinary profession of a glazier. And besides, long after the time when painted windows had become secure from Puritanic violence, a feeling lingered on that there was something un-Protestant in them -something inconsistent, it might be, with the pure light of truth. For many years more, few were put up; nor these, for the most part, without much difference of opinion, and sometimes a great deal of angry controversy. It may have stirred the irony of men who had no sympathy with these suspicions, that corporations and private persons who would by no means admit into their churches windows in which scenes from our Saviour's life were pictured in hues that

1 Milman's Annals of St. Paul, quoted by Longman, Hist. of St. P. 153. 2 Jas. Dallaway on Architecture, &c. 443-5.

Beresford Hope, Worship, &c. 19.

When they startle at a dumb picture in a window.'-T. Lewis, in The Scourge, Apr. 9, 1717, No. 9.

vied with those of the ruby and the sapphire, had often no scruples in emblazoning upon them, to their own glorification, the arms of their family or their guild.' Winston, speaking of the east window in University College, Oxford, done by Giles of York in 1687, the earliest example of a stained glass window after the Reformation, remarks how much the art had deteriorated even in its most mechanical departments.3 In the first quarter, however, of the eighteenth century, there was some improvement in it. Joshua Price, in the east window of St. Andrew's, Holborn, has 'rivalled the rich. colouring of the Van Linges. The painting is deficient in brilliancy, and some of the shadows are nearly opaque; yet these defects may almost be overlooked in the excellence. of its composition, and in its immense superiority over all other works executed between the commencement of the eighteenth century and the revival of the mosaic system.'' Joshua Price also executed some of the side windows in Magdalene College, and restored, in 1715, those in Queen's College, Oxford, the work of Van Linge, which had been broken by the Puritans. William Price painted, in 1702, the scenes from the life of Christ, depicted on the lower lights of Merton College Chapel. They are 'weak as regards colour, enamel being used almost to the substitution of coloured glass,' and lose in beauty and effect by the glaring yellow in which they are framed. He also painted the windows which were put up in Westminster Abbey by order of Parliament in 1722,7 and repaired with considerable skill the Flemish windows of Rubens's time, which he purchased and put up on the south side of New College Chapel. It is remarkable that the Prices appear to have been the last who possessed the old secret of manufacturing the pure ruby glass. After their time, until its rediscovery some forty years ago in France, it was a familiar instance of a 'lost art.'

6

When nearly fifty years had passed, some little attention

Various illustrations of this may be found in Paterson's Pictas Londinensis.

2 A new one was substituted for it in 1864.

3 C. Winston, Hints on Glass Colouring, i. 206.

J. Dallaway, Architecture, &c. 446.

• Winston, Hints, &c. 207.

4 Id. 207.

Callaway, 446.

8 C. Winston, Memoirs Illustrative of the Art of Glass Painting, 153.

C. Winston. Hints, &c. i. 216.