In the Christian art of the Catacombs, the fact of persecution is revealed to the most careless eye. From those mournful, yet triumphant syllables and symbols, we might postulate some Decius or Marcus Aurelius, had Eusebius never chronicled a martyrdom. Art is there the monument of men dying daily-of men whose life is itself a social death. It reduces itself to the monogram; veils itself in the emblem. Affection, demanding a memorial with tears, must devise something speedy, something secret. But when persecution gives place to freedom, behold how the grain of mustard-seed has become a great tree, which branches forth in colossal figures of mosaic and of gold, and blossoms in white marble, serpentine, and porphyry around the apse of the basilica.

Some of the medieval heresies and disputes have left their traces upon art. It is possible that a lurking Gnosticism may have added a designed severity to rudeness of conception, and rendered many representations of the Father so gloomy and forbidding. It has been thought that the controversy in the twelfth century concerning the Paraclete, to which Abelard gave occasion, has influenced the position of the sacred persons on some French windows of the period.

It is certain that the symbols of power with which the figure of the Deity was invested, varied with the government of particular countries, and their relation to the Pope. In Germany, the Father appears clad in imperial robes. In Italy and Spain, never in England, he wears the papal tiara; while France, especially when engaged in conflict with the Papacy, repudiates the triple crown, and depicts the Supreme as king. These insignia are the metaphors of art, and express, like the proverbs and the figurative colloquialisms of popular speech, the admiration or the antipathies of a nation. The decoration of churches in the north of Europe is part more practical and didactic than in the south. sented the feats of the Crusaders on the windows of St. Denis. churches were picture-bibles for the people. The narratives of Old Testament history were read on vast illuminated leaves of glass.

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The cathedral of Chartres, with its multitudinous statues and symbols, religious, historic, and physical, was at once the hornbook and the encyclopædia of many generations. The ecclesiastical art of the south sought rather to kindle a sentiment than to record events. Its favourite subjects were taken from dogma rather than from history. Coronations and assumptions of the Virgin in some upper realm of clouds, eclipsed the exploits of the church militant in this lower world.

The spirit of Renaissance art is doubtless in many respects blameworthy; its influence in many ways injurious. But the blame, be it more or less, should not wholly lie (where some enthusiasts would centre it) with the ostentation of merchant princes, and the ungodliness of artists. Men did not turn to pagan antiquity until the corruptions of the Church had rendered their old allegiance no longer possible. Effete as were the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, they had more life in them than the superstition they displaced. Platonism was a power in the fifteenth century, philosophy new-born, and speculation fraught with promise; while to multitudes the cowl was a fool's cap, and the crosier a croupier's rake. It was the disgust rather than the degeneracy of the sixteenth century which invested heathendom with exaggerated charms. Men saw the ideal of the old world, the actual of the new; the purest aspirations of ancient Greece, the dirtiest mechanism of modern Rome; the happiest art and the loftiest philosophy of heathenism: while Christendom exhibited but a futile statecraft in politics, a detected priestcraft in religion. The competition was not fair. For nearly a century before the revival of letters, art had been growing less religious, because the Church was growing so likewise, and because the adventure and activities of commerce had of necessity awakened men to tastes and interests beyond the routine of ecclesiastical ideas.

In France, it is remarkable to see how closely art has followed in the track of political theories. The magnificent absolutism of Louis XIV. had raised up a school of art in many respects national,

in no way natural. It might have been expected that the readers of Rousseau and Fontenelle would have returned in some degree to nature; that the Revolution would have emancipated art, along with so much beside. But the same movement which shook off the yoke of feudalism in politics, lent only additional oppressiveness to the yoke of classicism in the arts. How was this? France unhappily had not, like England, an old constitutional liberty of her own to fight for. She had no Magna Charta to defend; she gloried in no Habeas Corpus; she could point with triumphant indignation to no Bill of Rights. So she was fain to seek a scheme of polity in Utopia, a Bible in Plutarch, and a patron saint in Brutus. In like manner, such art as could survive amidst so much confusion, became classic to servility. The republics of Greece and Rome supplied models alike for the studio and the State. Antiquity led captive the imaginations of men in the sixteenth century by her genius for art; in the eighteenth by her genius for government. The French architecture of the last century assumed the Roman type, became practical and civic. Why build churches, without religion; chateaux, without noblesse; palaces, without a king? So architects are busy with bridges, market-halls, and abattoirs, with baths, with fountains, and with aqueducts.

The most flourishing periods of art have been those in which instruction has been most accessible, and popular sympathy most strongly engaged. Art is then healthiest when the patronage of the few is quickened and sustained by the applause of the manywhen the common soil whence it springs is as rich as upper air and sun are kindly. It was thus in England in the thirteenth century; thus in Flanders in the time of the Van Eycks; thus in Italy in the days of Giotto and Cimabue. Then the exhibition of a new window or a new painting made a holiday as populous, as full of flowers, as loud with shouting voices, as the entrance of an emperor bringing privilege and franchise. The painter felt that he spoke to the great heart of humanity when streets like the Borgo Allegri took a name of joy for ever from his

workmanship-when his picture, borne in solemn procession to the church, was followed with pride by the greatest men, and with blessing by the holiest, while the trooping city rent the air with acclamations as he passed, triumphant, with the laurels on his brow. But the patronage of kings and courts fluctuates with fashion, with politics, with conquest. The successful invasion of Italy by Charles VIII. was fatal to national art in France. Not the slightest prospect of success had the French painter, unless he pretended to Italian birth, or professed Italian training. In England, the Tudors and the Stuarts injured us by their almost exclusive patronage of foreign art. In the days of Queen Anne, we adopted something of the old Roman pride, and claiming conquest for ourselves, abandoned culture to the effeminate foreigner. Dutch formalism or Chinese monstrosity were the pets of tasteless fashion. English art was not to be revived till a thorough Englishman should appear and appeal to the English people. Such a genius England hailed in Hogarth.

THE LEGEND OF THE SANGREAL.*

NEXT to the old laws and the old ballads, we are most indebted to the old stories for our knowledge of the past. There are satirical and comic tales to give us pictures of the medieval manners. Chaucer and Boccacio are our Aristophanes and Plautus. There are the legends of miracle and saintship to represent to us the faith of the Middle Age. Between the laughter-loving freedom of the former class of tale and the solemn supernaturalism of the latter lies a third species, the story of chivalrous adventure and marvellous enchantment. In these romances the remains of Gothic superstition and fragments of oriental fable play a conspicuous part beside the

*From the National Magazine.

prowess of 'Sir Knight' and the piety of 'Sir Priest.' Hence the trolls and ellewomen, the giants and the dwarfs, the magic rings and flying-horses, the far-working spells of the wizard and the glamour of the fay. Among those traditions, which were the common property of so many minstrels and storytellers, there is not one which is more remarkable than the Legend of the Sangreal. It combines in itself nearly all the constituent elements to which we have adverted. It is as full of wonders as the story of Aladdin in the Arabian Nights, or the legends of Solomon and Aschmedai in the Talmud. It is as full of knightly combats and adventures as Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul. It is as full of reverence for holy men and holy things as the Lives of the Saints or the story of Count Robert. It unites (as did the military orders of Christendom) the spiritual and the secular interest, and belongs alike to the chivalrous world and the ecclesiastical. It might be selected from all the rest as the representative fiction of the Middle Ages.

The origin of the tradition concerning the Sangreal is enveloped in obscurity. Into the learned inquiries of Büsching, Lachmann, Simrock, or Göschel, it is not our purpose to enter. Thus much is certain, that San means holy, and that Greal, Graal, or Grál is the Provençal for vessel. The legend, then, of the Holy Vessel appears in various shapes in our hing Arthur, in the Mabinogion, and in the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the Parzival—the great German poem of the thirteenth century-it assumes its most poetical form, and has been invested by the somewhat fanciful antiquarianism of Germany with the most profound significance.

The early history of the Grâl carries us back to the expulsion of the rebel-angels. It is said that, when the thrones and princedoms of the fallen were driven over the bounds of heaven,

'With hideous ruin and combustion down,'

the falchion of the archangel Michael, descending full upon the crest of Satan, dashed into a thousand fragments his resplendent crown,that coronal, fashioned of heaven's pearl and diamond and sardonyx