cast it, was a Frenchman, who appears to have settled in England, and produced many works, of which, however, this statue and one of William, Earl of Pembroke, at Oxford, are said to be the only two that remain. The equestrian figure at Charing-Cross was, in spite of the assertion in the ballad, never set up till 1678, the civil war having broken out soon after its completion.

In the fable which described the Muses as the daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, we have a true history of the origin of both literature and the fine arts. The more we learn of the sources of poetry and painting and sculpture in every age and country, the more we find that either religious enthusiasm or religious chicanery drew the minds of men in those directions. Wherever we can discover a spontaneous civilization, an isolated national development, we can trace the drama, the lyric, and even the epic to the early necessities of worship. Wherever there has been a priestly government, we find painting and sculpture enlisted first in its service and developed under its protection. We need only point to India, Greece, and mediaval Europe, as instances.

But the very means which the hierarchy employs to uphold its supremacy, acts in time upon the people, and educates them to throw off ecclesiastical dominion. The mercenaries which a corrupt church has hired for its own service, influence, after a while, the hearts and minds of its subjects, and art and literature, like the levies of a despot, turn against their master at a critical moment, and assert the freedom of the people.

The Reformation was not the sole cause therefore of the abandonment of the Church by art. Even the invention of oilpainting, and the use of canvas and the easel, would not have effected it, without that general progress from superstition to science, from idealism to materialism, so evident throughout Europe from the end of the fifteenth century downwards. The reign of purely ecclesiastical art in Italy closed with Raphael; in Germany the Rhenish and Byzantine schools ceased with the Reformation, and the Dutch school only began with it. Lastly, in Belgium we have only to compare Rubens with Van Eyck, to admit that, while the Flemings retained their religion, Flemish art had found lay patrons as liberal as the Church. But in England, where the Church had never been so rich or so luxurious as on the Continent, there never had been an ecclesiastical art.

Hitherto, then, art had been scarcely known in England but as a royal luxury; but when Charles I. came to the throne, he at once began to form a collection and turn his attention to the encouragement of painting and the kindred arts. This taste he owed partly to that journey to Spain, which had caused so much anxiety to the pedant James, and partly to the companionship of Buckingham. "Steenie," as that monarch delighted to call his

Prince Charles at Madrid.

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favourite, may have been devoid of every talent required in a minister, but was certainly ready-made for the position of a grandee. That shrewd woman, his mother, had him sent at an early age to acquire in France the tastes and accomplishments which were then indispensable to the "compleat gentleman," and among these, the cultivation of art took a prominent place. It was the favourite's ambition which brought about that intimacy with "baby Charles," to which the latter owed his unpopularity and the direction of his tastes. Probably the far-seeing upstart had made up his mind to be the right arm of more than one sovereign; and as he had nothing to expect from the people, thought it wisest to make a friend of their future king. At any rate he knew the unpopularity of the proposed Spanish match, and felt that much must be risked to break it off. The young prince was the first conquest to be made, and Villiers succeeded on this occasion in gaining that ascendancy over his mind, which he continued to hold till Fellar's knife released the king. With silly James, Buckingham had an easy task; and though the king threw himself on his bed and stormed and fumed and whined that he should lose "baby Charles," the prince and the favourite set out in 1623 for the capital of Spain.

For five months the Count-Duke Olivares kept the two guests in suspense as to the result of their negotiations; but Charles was in no hurry to go, and enjoyed himself immensely. Philip IV. and his minister were almost a parallel of Charles and Buckingham, two years later. Olivares, like Villiers, loved power for its own sake, and had obtained a complete influence over the mind of his young master. Philip, like Charles, was too fond of the pleasures of grandeur to give himself up to the labours of government, and Spain, like England, was ere long in a state of open rebellion. But he most resembled his English guest in the love of art. Like him, he had been taught painting, and even handled the palette himself. Like Charles, again, he collected, employing agents to travel and purchase pictures, and when the English monarch fell, he commissioned his ambassador to invest largely in the treasures of Whitehall. He gave a pension of 1000 crowns per annum to a convent at Palermo in exchange for Raphael's "Jesus going to Calvary," and called the picture his "Jewel;" while he gave the name of his "Pearl" to the same master's "Holy Family," which had been the best picture at Mantua, and for which, at the Whitehall sale, he laid down L.2000. Lastly, just as ambassadors and courtiers propitiated Charles with works of art, the grandees and nobles of Spain filled the galleries of their master with presents of pictures. Velazquez and Rubens painted his portrait, and the former had just arrived at Madrid when the royal English guest reached it.

Ball-fights, comedies, bunting-parties, dances, and all the gorgeous ceremonial of Romanism, in the most Catholic" capital of Europe, gave the young visitor a very diferent idea of a sovereign's life to that which he had picked up in the court of the worthy book-worm at home; and if his English education had armed him with sufficient principle to resist the temptation to indulge in the dissolute life led by his host,—though to believe Milton, his life even after his marriage was not as pure as it should have been, he was at any rate not proof against the rich allurements of the galleries and studios of Madrid. The sight of the Escorial and Pardo fired him with the desire to form a gallery in England, and he at once set about to procure what pictures he could on the spot, borrowing from Buckingham the necessary finances. The collections of the Count of Villamediana-who was supposed to have been a lover of Queen Isabella, -and of the sculptor Pompeyo Leoni, were sold by auction during his stay at Madrid, and it was at one of these sales that he purchased three of his Titians; the one a portrait of Charles V., with a white dog, another "The Marquess of Guasto addressing his soldiers, and the third a half-length of an Italian woman. He also brought away the St John Baptist of Correggio, now at Windsor, and supposed by Dr Waagen to be a Parmeggiano. Philip must have meant well to him indeed, for he presented him with the famous Antiope of Titian, to which his father attached so much value, that when told there was a fire at the Pardo, he asked if the Antiope were saved, and on being answered in the affirmative, exclaimed: "enough, any thing else can be replaced." Other celebrated pictures had been cured, and even packed up for him, but he left Madrid in such haste, that he was obliged to abandon most of them.

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It was, then, in Spain, and under Buckingham's guidance, that the young prince, then twenty-three years of age, formed a taste for collecting, which, on his accession two years later, he rapidly developed. This taste, predominant among the princes and noblemen of Europe since Lorenzo the Magnificent had set the fashion of it, had been neglected in England. Henry VIII. had, indeed, a small gallery, amounting, inclusive of miniatures, to no more than 150 pieces, and Elizabeth had added a few to these, which were chiefly portraits, and which descended by inheritance to Charles. But to the famous Thomas, Earl of Arundel, must be given the honour of being the first private collector in this country. The amiable Prince Henry had followed in his steps, and Villiers himself had begun to form a gallery, and often exchanged with Charles some of his best pictures. The Spanish purchases, and the collections of Henry VIII. and Prince Henry, formed the nucleus of the gallery for which

Inigo Jones built his masterpiece at Whitehall; and about two years after his accession, Charles gave no less than L.80,000, equal to a much larger sum in the present day, for the splendid collection of the Dukes of Mantua, which amounted to no less than 1387 pictures, including 9 by Raphael, 7 by Rubens, 28 by Titian, and 16 by Vandyck. But the gem of Charles' collection, for the preservation of which we have to thank the relenting spirit of Cromwell, who bought it in for the nation at L.300, was the series of cartoons by Raphael, which had been left in Belgium. Rubens himself gave information to Charles of their existence and locality, and undertook their purchase, and certainly England may be proud of their possession. If ever we are to have a National Gallery, capable of displaying what our wealth has acquired, and of imparting taste to the people, these cartoons must have a prominent place in it.

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He desired

Nor was Charles' encouragement of art limited to the chase of pictures and patronage of foreign painters. to see a school of painting flourish in England; and about the year 1635 laid the plan for an academy, to be called Museum Minerva, to which none but gentlemen were to be admitted, and in which professors were to teach the arts and sciences, including painting, architecture, and the "science of medals," with Sir Francis Kynaston, whose house in Covent Garden was to be the temporary college of the academy, as its regent. A suggestion of Prince Henry again induced him to encourage the foundation of a manufactory of tapestry at Mortlake, in Surrey. To this he gave a grant of L.2000, and appointed as its superintendent, at a salary of L.100 per annum, Francis Cleyn, the Danish painter of grotesque, who was Dobson's master. It was to this manufactory that the slips of five of the seven cartoons, rescued from Arras, were sent to be copied by Cleyn in tapestry, as we learn from the catalogue of Vanderdoort, who mentions, that the other two were kept in "a slit-deal chest," at Whitehall. Whether these tapestries were ever completed or not, does not appear; but this manufactory and the Museum Minervæ both fell to the ground when the civil war broke out.

The Parliament, always glad to get money, voted, in March 23, 1648, the sale of all the personal property of the late king, and the galleries, of course, among it. It is remarkable that the immediate object of this sale was to raise that very ship-money, the demand for which had set the kingdom against their sovereign. So ill was the sale conducted that it only produced L.118,080, which, as Walpole remarks, was absurdly little for the contents of nineteen palaces. The pictures and statues brought L.49,900, though undoubtedly worth more than twice that sum.

The collections of Buckingham and Arundel suffered the same

fate, sooner or later. The second Villiers pledged for very bread some of his father's treasures, and the rest were sold by auction at Antwerp. Thus were dispersed the finest collections of their day; and thus was frustrated the attempt of Charles-if vanity and selfishness were not his sole motives in collecting-to introduce art into England.

The king's love of art and artists seems to have out balanced every other disposition. Though the Banquetting Hall was built for banquetting, he would never allow it to be used for that purpose, but went to considerable expense in erecting temporary buildings for the Court masques-arranged generally by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones,-and that because the hall was filled with pictures which he feared to have damaged. In this splendid building, with a ceiling painted by Rubens himself, he delighted to sit, and here he assembled his favourite artists, and talked to them much in the style that a modern picture-dealer does, for he was a great connoisseur, and could father a work of art more correctly than any of his court, to believe the accounts of his courtiers. But his greatest pleasure seems to have been a trip in the royal barge to Blackfriars, where the so-called "King's Artists" were lodged, and where he would watch them at work in their studios, and discuss their art with them. He was no bad artist himself, and it is said that Rubens touched up his pictures for him.

The main knowledge we possess of Charles' collection is due to the catalogue compiled by Abraham Vanderdoort, the Keeper of the Royal Gallery at Whitehall. This man was a character. His head by Dobson is that of the timorous, anxious dependant, which his end proves him to have been. He was originally employed by the Emperor Rodolph, and came to England in the reign of Janies, having in his possession, according to Walpole, a wax bust of a woman, which he had begun for the Emperor. Prince Henry was so much pleased with it that he induced hin to part with it, on condition that he should be made Keeper of the Cabinet, at a salary of L.50 per annum. In 1625 Charles confirmed him in this office, with "an allowance of five shillings and sixpence by the day for his boorde wages," and added the appointments of Master Embosser and Assistant at the Mint. But, besides this care for the inner man, we learn from the Conway papers that the king even condescended to concern himself for Abraham's domestic happiness, and actually selected for him a spouse, to whom he wrote, strongly recommending the keeper of the pictures as a fitting mate. The cause of his death is no less curious. It appears that Charles had intrusted to his charge a miniature of Gibson's, with orders to take particular care of it. "Vanderdoort," says Walpole, "laid it up so carefully, that