Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/396

 284 NOTICES OF FOREIGN SEPULCIIKAL BRASSES. more rude but effective process, which must be regarded as its prototype, if not as its precursor. The series of monu- mental brasses, of which even the knowledge is as yet almost limited to the antiquaries of Great Britain, has derived scarcely an example from countries wherein Durer and Marc Antonio handled the burin with such skill and facility. It is singular, that even in the sister kingdoms scarcely any examples of sepulchral brasses are to be found. Three mural plates exist in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin ; two of these representing Robert Sutton, 1528, and Galf Fyche, 1537, Deans of that church, are well engraved in Mason's History of St. Patrick's Cathedral. In Scotland, I beheve that a few plates of slight interest are to be seen at Glasgow. The most curious evidence, however, of any sepulchral effigy of metal in North Britain is supplied by Mr. Graham's valuable monograph on lona, lately published. (Plate 33.) Tradition affirms that the figure was of silver; the indent or matrix on the slab alone remains, with the rivet holes, plainly showing the original character of the memorial. It was of large size, and is described as the tomb of Macleod of Macleod. The outline appears to indicate that it was a work of the fourteenth, or possibly of the fifteenth, century. In France, the tradition even of the existence, scarce half a century since, of a striking variety of sepulchral portraitures engraved on metal, with which the cathedi'als and abbey churches were profusely enriched, has perished ; and the memorials themselves, with scarcely an exception, were destroyed in the revolutionary crisis of 1790. We are not, indeed, aware that any sepulchral brass has hitherto been noticed in that country, except the interesting mural tablet of one of the Bishops of Amiens, Jean VIII. (deceased in 1456), with a small kneeling effig}^, in the cathech-al at that cit}''. At Constance, the English antiquary, on visiting the cathedral, is struck by noticing a single memorial of a kind so familiar to him in the churches of his own country, — the sepulchral brass of Robert Ilallum, Bishop of Salisbury, who died during the council held in that city in 1416. On examination, there may seem ground for the conclusion that it had been brought from his native land, and was graven, possibly, by the same hand as the figure of Archbishop Cranley, at New College Chapel, Oxford, and other con-