growth, is not susceptible of an unqualified answer. Perhaps it may be fairly assumed, that to those studies which it has no direct interest in suppressing, a despotic government would be as favourable as any other mode of polity. To that class of literature which opens the foundations of civil authority, and diffuses a spirit of research into the nature and extent of the civil obligations, such a government will be necessarily adverse; but the arts which embellish life, and solace and captivate the public mind, are auxiliary rather than hostile to despotic institutions. They divert the public intelligence from political inquiry; and impart, on the other hand, to the sternness of authority, the amiable and conciliating character of patron and protector. It is thus that arbitrary governments receive back, in the splendour and elegance of the fine arts, more than an usurious compensation for the munificence by which they were reared and cherished into growth.

There is, however, no need of reasoning from mere presumption. Mrs. Graham has, by her historical references in aid of her position, totally destroyed its universality. For the period in the Italian annals, so propitious, according to her theory, to the art of painting, was by no means a period of political freedom, and she is singularly unfortunate in the choice of it. Florence had then descended from her rank amongst the free commonwealths. At the close of the fourteenth century, the constitution of 1328 was nearly superseded, and her government, if not in legal form, became in substance a pure aristocracy; nor did the house of Medici, which restored the popular party, restore the republic. Cosmo began his career by trampling upon the popular institutions of the state. According to Machiavelli, the dictatorial power, on pretence of fresh dangers, was renewed six times in twenty years. In 1466, that house had acquired an acknowledged supremacy; its chief nominated the magistrates, and drew to himself the whole conduct of the republic. The subversion of the republic, prepared by his two immediate ancestors, was completed by Lorenzo. The empty names of the magistracies, the eadem magistratuum vocabula kept up the illusion of freedom, but the title of principe del governo proclaimed its extinction. The art of painting had, indeed, arisen in freer periods; but it was the puny and sickly infancy of the art when Cimabue and Giotto flourished. Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolomeo, Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle, were reserved for the tranquil and munificent dictatorship of Lorenzo; and at his death the art and its professors migrated from the troublous anarchy which followed, to the more quiet asylum of the Vatican; but they were attracted thither and to the other Italian states by patrons like the Medici, and governments endued with equal, eans of patronage.

Mrs. Graham must be reminded, also, that it was under the sway of Pericles that Grecian art reached the height which has been considered in all succeeding ages as its ideal perfection. It was then that Phidias formed the severe and sublime style, of which the few fragments that have been preserved to us are the admiration and despair of succeeding artists; and Parrhasius painted that celebrated allegory of the Athenian democracy, which, though lost to modern times, is still immortal in the consenting praises of antiquity. Pericles was, in truth, virtually at the head of Athens for forty years-for fifteen years of this space he was undisguisedly its sole tyrant.

The arts, indeed, were not indigenous to ancient Rome; but the domination of Augustus was the era oftheir greatest engrafted splendour. The Pantheon is a proud and enduring memorial of the munificence with which they were cherished in his reign, though the severe graces of Attic sculpture, and the Doric simplicity of architecture, were not destined for the imperial city. Το Athens, ancient Rome, and Florence, the eye naturally turns for the brightest epochs of the arts, whilst Pericles, Augustus, and Lorenzo, severally swayed their destinies,-periods, indeed, neither of absolute slavery, nor of entire freedom. If, therefore, any general inference is deducible from these instances, it will be this, that it is that intermediate political condition of thingsthat isthmus, as it were, in human societies, which divides freedom from servitude-that point in social and moral history, of which security rather than liberty is the characteristic, which is the most propitious to their growth and expansion.

If any proximate cause is to be assigned for the phenomenon, reason and common sense will suggest a very obvious one. It is in such a state of things that the means of public munificence are in the hands of him who has absorbed the powers of the commonwealth; for, wherever patronage is liberally distributed, the arts necessarily shoot up as in a soil disciplined and enriched for their reception.

Et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum.

Whereas, in free states, not only a struggle for liberty, or a course of external conquest, leaves no repose or breathing time for elegant studies (which was emphatically true of the republican ages of Rome), but the funds of patronage are too parsimoniously and coldly administered to kindle them into life and maturity.

According to Mrs. Graham's theory, however, it should seem that the connexion of the arts and political freedom was neces→ sary and uniform,-a theory, according to which, the Hanseatic cities in the thirteenth century ought to have abounded in pain

ters and sculptors, and New York or Washington, in our own day, to have produced Michael Angelos and Raffaelles. If liberty and art are never divorced, and the perfection of art in every country follows that of its civil institutions, the British school of artists, instead of depending upon foreign study and laborious imitation, would have been by this time the legislators of taste and beauty-what Athens once was, and Rome is at present, the Mecca to which modern artists direct their pilgrimage. Nor have private and public munificence been wanting in Great Britain; but it would surely be the fondest nationality to predicate perfection of the imaginative arts in Britain. If, as it should seem, there is an irremoveable impediment to their complete expansion and full maturity here, might it not be traced, in some measure, to physical causes which have always, in conjunction with moral and political ones, influenced their growth?

There is a visible pathology in nations: their faculties, like those of individuals, are moulded by those objects of immediate perception with which they are most conversant. Nature, a prodigal mother, lavished upon Greece every charm of climate and scenery: a delicious landscape, breathing those enchanting beauties which the poet of Colonos has so exquisitely painted:-above all, the human person, endued alike with the nobler proportions and more delicate symmetries of form, administered through the eye a perpetual feast to the intellect. Nursed amidst the loveliness and grandeur of the visible creation, the Greek perceptions were exquisitely alive to the fair and the beauteous. The world of imagination is peopled by images resembling those which abound in the physical world. It is easy to imagine the facility with which a sculptor or painter, thus trained and disciplined to outward beauty, would transfer to his picture or statue the familiar subjects of his hourly contemplations. It was thus that Grecian art seems to have arisen; but by such easy and gentle gradations, that it is impossible to fix the exact period or spot of their nativity.

Here, indeed, it will naturally be suggested, that Italy being blessed with the same bounties of nature, the arts ought to have made an equal bound in ancient Rome; but these physical tendencies were at Rome met by strong and powerful counteractions. The perfection of the arts in Greece contributed to keep them in a state of imperfection in Italy. The Romans contemplated that perfection with an affected contempt and indolent despair: their vanity took refuge in other qualities, and the conquest of the world atoned for more elegant achievements.

Excudent alii spirantia mollius ære,

Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus.

It was also the fashion to decry the cultivation of the arts as badges of servitude, and to rail with Cato against their effeminacy. And even when the taste for these foreign elegancies began more generally to prevail, they were by no means cultivated as Roman accomplishments. Slaves and freed men of Grecian origin were employed as statuaries and painters.

The birth-place of modern painting, Italy, has never rivalled the sculpture of ancient Greece. In the school of Canova skilful artists may be formed, but the school of Canova is that of ancient Greece. Does it not, in some degree, contribute at least to the solution of the problem, that the modern Italians, with a clime nearly as favourable, and scenery as picturesque, as that of Greece, and as propitious therefore to landscape painting (an art unknown to antiquity), are not only much inferior in external form and proportion to the ancient Greeks, but even to the elder Romans? Perhaps the adulteration of their blood with that of the northern nations, and, above all, the ungraceful character of the Gothic costume, will contribute still more to its solution. Hence the modern artists are driven to the schools of ancient sculpture for the human figure, which were studies from forms unencumbered with dress, and the noble and animated attitudes of those who contended at their public games. Olympia and Pisa were the academies of Phidias and Lysippus.

It is probable therefore, that it is in some measure owing to her physical disadvantages, that Great Britain has not been the favourite seat of the fine arts.* Nature has read this lesson to our national vanity, fed as it is to satiety by the glories of our military fame, and the greatness of our civil superiority. "You are not destined to be a nation of great artists, but you are permitted to advance to the utmost limits of a meritorious mediocrity." Our artists emigrate to Italy; and English art is in fact the offspring of Italy, whence our artists return every year, with their portfolios filled with Italian sketches, and their understandings stored with Italian maxims. It is obvious that such an institution may carry the arts to an advanced state of their progress; but to a school founded on foreign imitation, originality of conception, and boldness of design, will be wanting. Such was not the process by which the genius of Michael Angelo and Raffaelle was moulded. Diligence, and assiduity, and the prodigality of public and private patronage, have indeed effected much in this country; and if the physical and moral causes which have been at work in other countries, to bring the arts to a higher maturity and a more luxuriant growth, do not operate

Even the Gothic architecture is of Oriental rather than Saxon origin.

amongst us, we have no reason to repine. We can afford to forego that part of a nation's glory, whilst we have a frame of civil polity in which freedom is enshrined and consecrated, the solid and protecting edifice of social and moral happiness, though devoid of the lighter and more ornamental graces of the frieze and the architrave.

In the foregoing remarks, it has by no means been our object to insist upon any positive dogma. Upon such subjects, a few facts may be easily swelled into a theory; but no safe or philosophical conclusion can be established upon so narrow an induction. Hume, we think, departed too much from his usual caution, when he endeavoured to build up his hypothesis of the connexion of arts and sciences with frames of civil government. We have ventured to suggest that they depend upon the mixed influence of various causes, and have, therefore, said enough, we trust, to ensure, or at least to merit, Mrs. Graham's forgiveness for not acquiescing in her undistinguishing and general proposition, of the invariable alliance between art and freedom.

"the

ART. III.-Correlative Claims and Duties; or, An Essay on Necessity of a Church Establishment, and the Means of exciting Devotion and Church Principles among its Members;" to which "The Society for promoting Christian Knowledge and Church Union in the Diocese of St. David," adjudged a Premium of 501. in December 1820. By the Rev. Samuel Charles Wilks, A. M. 8vo. pp. 461. Hatchard, London, 1821.

IT has frequently been lamented by persons well acquainted with the general state of the country, that so few of our people have any adequate information concerning the nature and excellency of our National Church. If the interests of religion were of little account among us, or if it were the habit of Englishmen to follow, with unreflecting submission, the course which had been pursued by their fathers, the practical evils_resulting from this ignorance might be comparatively small. But in the existing state of things, they are of very serious magnitude. From various causes, among which may doubtless be reckoned the provision made by the Church for the religious instruction of the people through every part of the kingdom, there prevails generally a strong sense of the importance of Divine truth, and a considerable acquaintance with the chief doctrines of revelation. The influence of this knowledge, and of these impressions, we discover in several ways. Hence, in a great measure, those religious and charitable institutions,