Page:The Obligations of the Universities Towards Art.djvu/36

 Rh elevated thought and beauty, and even more blameable defects, have become their own gospel to follow and preach; and as this is easy to understand and practise too many apostles are induced to spread it abroad.

Yet it must be excepted that there are one or two naturalistic sculptors in France who have produced admirable works, and these are true representative of its mediæval sculptors.

I wish we had more time to treat of the Art of England. It had a noble beginning in the reign of Henry III, which all may learn by reading Flaxman's Lectures and Stothard's illustrated volume on the paintings in the old Palace of Westminster destroyed by fire in 1834. The Scotch War of Independence, with all its troubles, was succeeded by the wars in France of a hundred years, which, with the York and Lancaster contest, managed to engage the energy of the nation until the Reformation troubles were at hand. We take our struggles for freedom—or what may be made to figure as such—very ruinously. Our mediæval disorders could not destroy the art of letters, but they did for one hundred and fifty years reduce it to rudeness. Neither altogether could they destroy Art living in builded forms; but the arts of painting and sculpture are personally costly to conduct, and without a nation's care for the matter, the Art must die out, and many quiet years of a new generation are needed to revive native ability.

When a period of peace came and want of artistic power was felt, it was supplied by foreigners, and they flourished until driven out by the Parliamentary