“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 171

had life and influence; sometimes aiming at Heaven with brick for stone and slime for mortar-anon bound down to painting of porcelain, and carving of ivory, but always with an inward consciousness of power which might indeed be palsied or imprisoned, but not in operation vain. Altars have been rent, many-ashes poured out,-hands withered-but we alone have worshipped, and received no answer-the pieces left in order upon the wood, and our names writ in the water that runs round about the trench.¹

4. It is easier to conceive than to enumerate the many circumstances which are herein against us, necessarily, and exclusive of all that wisdom might avoid, or resolution vanquish. First, the weight of mere numbers, among whom ease of communication rather renders opposition of judgment fatal, than agreement probable; looking from England to Attica, or from Germany to Tuscany, we may remember to what good purpose it was said that the magnetism of iron was found not in bars, but in needles. Together with this adversity of number comes the likelihood of many among the more available intellects being held back and belated in the crowd, or else prematurely out-wearied; for it now needs both curious fortune and vigorous effort to give to any, even the greatest, such early positions of eminence and audience as may feed their force with advantage; so that men spend their strength in opening circles, and crying for place, and only come to speech of us with broken voices and shortened time.² Then follows the diminution

¹ [See 1 Kings xviii. 38.]

² [The view here expressed that small states and city communities are more favourable than large states to the production of genius was expounded by Ruskin, with some limitations, in a letter to his father a few years before the date of this review:-

“BAVENO, Sunday, 24th Aug. [1845].-... Sismondi most truly says that in Florence, where every citizen of common respectability, down to the lowest tradesman, had the chance, the probable chance, of becoming one of the twelve Anziani, of supreme authority, the struggle to obtain this position, to make themselves fit for it, and the faculties developed in the possession of it, gave to the whole nation such force of character for a time as no other exhibited. But I conceive it to be a morbid excitement, and one essentially involving the necessity of following reaction and degradation. Such a government cannot subsist, it can have no settled principles; it is an admirable school for the people, but a miserable instrument in its

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