314 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

interesting as those which had been sought amidst the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks; and he contrasted with the familiar circumstances of urban life, the majesty and the aërial elevation of the most noble architecture, expressing its details in more splendid accumulation, and with a more patient love than ever had been reached or manifested before his time by any artist who introduced such subjects as members of a general composition. He thus became the interpreter of a great period of the world’s history, of that in which age and neglect had cast the interest of ruin over the noblest ecclesiastical structures of Europe, and in which there had been born at their feet a generation other in its feelings and thoughts than that to which they owed their existence, a generation which understood not their meaning, and regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character of its own, full of vigour, animation, and originality, which rendered the grotesque association of the circumstances of its ordinary and active life with the solemn memorialism of the elder building, one which rather pleased by the strangeness than pained by the violence of its contrast.

12. That generation is passing away, and another dynasty is putting forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more, mischievous in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places given the mediæval relics the aspect and associations of a kind of cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or patient and stern endurance, with which they frowned down the insult of the regardless crowed. Nominal restoration has done tenfold worse, and has hopelessly destroyed what time, and storm, and anarchy, and impiety had spared. The picturesque material of a lower kind is fast departing-and for ever. There is not, so far as we know, one city scene in central Europe which has not suffered from some jarring point of modernisation. The railroad and the iron wheel have done their work, and the characters of Venice, Florence, and Rouen are yielding day by day to a lifeless extension

[Version 0.04: March 2008]