3. Etat Actuel de l'Artillerie de Campagne en Europe. Par G. A. Jacobi, Lieut. d'Artillerie de la Garde Prus- sienne; ouvrage traduit de l'Allemand par le Capitaine d'Artillerie Mazé, Professeur à l'Ecole d'Application 2. Geschichte des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, &c. :-His- tory of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries down to the Fall of the French Empire. By Professor 3. Historical Memoir of a Mission to the Court of Vienna in 1806. By the Right Hon. Sir Robert Adair, G.C.B. 4. Histoire des Cabinets de l'Europe pendant le Consulat et l'Empire, écrite avec les Documents réunis aux Archives des Affaires Etrangères, 1800-1815. Par 5. Correspondence between Viscount Castlereagh and the Emperor Alexander of Russia respecting the King- dom of Poland. Presented to the House of Com- mons by Her Majesty's command, in pursuance of their 6. Denkschriften des Ministers Freiherrn von Stein, &c. :— Memoirs of the Minister Baron von Stein on German Constitutions. Edited by G. H. Pertz. 7. Wichtige Urkunden für den Rechtszustand, &c. :-Im- portant Documents concerning the Public Law of the German Nation, with original Annotations by J. L. Klüber. Selected from his Papers and illustrated by 8. Die Verhandlungen der Bundesversammlung, &c. :- Proceedings of the Diet from the Revolutionary Move- ments of the year 1830 down to the Secret Minis- terial Conferences at Vienna. From the Registers of 9. Die Verhandlungen der Bundesversammlung von den Geheimen Ministerial-Conferenzen, &c. :-Proceedings of the Diet from the Secret Ministerial Conferences 13. Memoir on the Constitutional Rights of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the Right and Duty of the German Confederation, and the Purport of the Eng- lish Guarantee of 1720, presented to Lord Palmerston on 8th April, 1848, with a Postscript. By Chevalier 14. The Relations of the Duchies of Schleswig and Hol- stein to the Crown of Denmark and the Germanic Confederation, and the Treaty Engagements of the VII.-1. Geschichte der Europäisch-Abendländischen oder un- serer heutigen Musik, von dem ersten Jahrhundert des Christenthums bis auf unsere Zeit. Von R. Kiesewetter. 2. The Quantity and Music of the Greek Chorus. Disco- vered by the Rev. W. W. Moseley, A.M., LL.D. 3. Mozart's Leben. Von A. Oulibichef, Ehrenmitglied der Philharmonischen Gesellschaft in St. Petersburg. THE QUARTERLY REVIEW. ART. I.—1. A Handbook of the History of the Spanish and French Schools of Painting. By Sir Edmund Head, Bart. London. 1847. 2. Annals of Spanish Painters. By Wm. Stirling, Esq. 2 vols. London. 1848. FEW persons, however conversant with art, can visit for the first time the gallery of Spanish paintings which Louis-Philippe added to the Louvre, without some disappointment; and it is likely enough that with nine-tenths of the uninitiated the feeling may be akin to that which Mr. Thomas Coryate betrayed two hundred and fifty years ago, when he inspected a certain convent and found therein all the walls most excellently adorned, but no amorous conceits, no lascivious toyes of dame Venus or wanton Cupid; all tending to mortification, all to devotion.' Certainly one hears without surprise that the sensual Parisians passed pretty nearly this sort of verdict when that exhibition of Spanish sackcloth was first opened; they could not appreciate the objects for which art was chiefly employed in Spain by the Church, long its best and almost only patron: where, at her stern bidding, sculpture assumed the cowl and painting took the veil-both being tasked, not to decorate museums, but heighten the awe of altars. So ghostly, according to Pacheco (p. 57), was a picture at Seville, that he feared to remain alone in the chapel with it after nightfall: so persuasive, says Dr. Ayala (vii. 4), was a painting at Salamanca of St. Jerome scourging himself for reading Cicero, that students of pious bent could not on beholding it resist self-flagellation. A friend of our own on his return from the Peninsula, enlivened his country-house with Spanish pictures: coming home one day he found a many-acred neighbour waiting for him among them, and was thus welcomed,- Thank heaven! you are here at last, for I felt quite uncomfortable in such grim looking company.' In a word, sacrifice to the graces was heresy with ascetics, who strove to macerate, not pamper, the vanities of the world and lusts of the eye; who, dreading beauty as a siren too seductive for weak flesh, banished her symbols and courted the repulsive. Can it be wondered that such works, now torn from their original shrines and desecrated in lay galleries, should VOL. LXXXIII. NO. CLXV. B should loom gloomily and out of place, like monks thrust from dim cloisters into gay daylight? It must be admitted that by far the greater portion of this collection at the Louvre consists of untrue, doubtful, and damaged specimens; but even at Madrid and Seville, where pictures of the highest class abound, they fail, with few exceptions, to inspire love at first sight, like the productions of Italian and Flemish artists at Dresden and elsewhere; the latter reflect a life and nature intelligible to greater numbers-and mankind only really sympathises with what it understands. A collection of genuine Spanish pictures may be compared to a Cortes of old assembled at Toledo, where dark scowling priests sat mingled-the fair sex excluded-with cloaked hidalgos, the representatives of a fenced in and peeled people.' Spain at this day is barely admitted into the general family of Europe, with which her things of the past have still less in common; the war of succession under Louis XIV. lifted up a corner only of her self-suspended shroud, which the invasion of Buonaparte and subsequent revolutions have rent in shreds. Spain, while powerful and independent, looked down with unsocial pride on the rest of the world; unbenefited by foreign criticism, which corrects, unpolished by intercourse, which rubs off angularities, her Turklike ignorance-no simple vacuity-was backed by prejudices equally Turklike; by nature slow in movements and averse to innovations, she was contented in a fool's paradise to see her sun stand still. Above all, no antagonistic influences ever shook the monopoly of her creed; no wars of religion, as in Germany, France, or Flanders-no Reformation or Puritan Revolution, as in England, ever stunted her arts, which, reared and sheltered by the church, preserved a clerical element, long after reverential sentiment had been shaken elsewhere. Hence the legendary fossil-like remains of extinct notions which turn up at every step in this land, where, as in Ariosto's moon, everything lost and forgotten is stored away for antiquarians; hence the anachronisms of style-from which so many Spanish artists seem to belong to a date earlier by half a century than their real one; hence that peculiar flavour with which their art, not less than their literature, is tinctured, and which strikes the foreigner, like the pitched-skin borracha in their Valdepeñas, as passing strange at least. The religious characteristic of Spanish art was the necessary form and pressure of an ultra-Catholic land-the legacy of a war waged for eight centuries, when creed and country were synonyms. The first boast of the true Castilian was the purity of his faith-and the outward types and tokens must be maintained no |