epoch of the Florentine school. Though he can scarcely rank with the great masters that had gone before him in a school which boasted of da Vinci and Andrea del Sarto, he attained a considerable reputation, owing to the correctness of his drawing, the brilliance of his colouring, and the delicate sentiment with which he treated his subjects. These he was not very fortunate in selecting. Two of his best pieces are Lot and his Daughters, and Joseph and Potiphar's Wife. Everybody who has been at Hampton Court will remember the latter, which is conspicuous for the voluptuousness of its colouring. his most pleasing piece, painted, like the other two, for Charles, and now in the Louvre, is a Repose in Egypt. The Virgin is seated on the ground, giving the breast to the child; while Joseph, worn out with heat and fatigue, is lying near them, with his head on the pack. This picture was bought by Jabach at the sale of Charles' galleries, and from him passed into the hands of Louis XIV.

But

Gentileschi had studied in Rome from the age of seventeen, and stayed in Florence, Genoa, Turin, and Paris; and had, in fact, achieved his reputation before coming to this country. This, he did, according to the French biographers, in 1623; but, as we are told that Charles "invited" him, lodged him in the palace, and employed him to paint ceilings at Greenwich, we can scarcely believe that he arrived before Charles' accession. On the other hand, as he painted several pictures for Buckingham, he must have been here some time before the assassination of the favourite, in 1628, probably in 1626. However this may be, Charles gave him handsome apartments, and a salary sufficiently liberal to induce him to settle here. He even found it worth while to send for his daughter Artemisia, from Naples, where she was leading a life of extravagance, for which she must have employed other resources besides her pencil. She was far more successful than her father in portraiture, and many of the nobility sat to her. Orazio died in 1646 or 7, and was buried, says Walpole, under the altar of the chapel in Somerset House. It does not appear what became of his daughter.

After so long a list of foreign artists, we may well ask, what our own countrymen were doing. There were, indeed, few who rose above mediocrity, and fewer still, who are known out of this country. Of the latter, there were in this reign only James Hamilton, who painted birds and grapes, and was employed by the Elector of Brandenburg, and whose sons Philip and John followed in his steps, and have found a place for two of their pieces in the Pinakothek; and Alexander and Samuel Cooper, the miniature painters. Their uncle, and master, John Hoskins, was a good painter in the same style, and employed by Charles,

Peter Oliver, the son of Isaac, is well known for his water-colour and indian ink drawings; and Henry, better known as Old Stone, was "an excellent copyist of Vandyck and the Italian masters, having spent many years in Italy, Holland, and France. He died in 1653." Jamisone has been called the Vandyck of Scotland; but, of his title to the name, we are not competent to speak. He drew a whole length of Charles, when in Edinburgh, in 1633. He is said to have been a pupil of Rubens, though it is not known when he went to Antwerp, or how long he was there. Francis Barlow, a Lincolnshire artist, painted birds and fish, but does not appear to have been known to Charles. But, if England needs to be redeemed from the imputation of sterility in Art in this reign, we have only to point to William Dobson and Inigo Jones. It would be poor charity to Inigo to drag him forward as a painter, though he was sent to Italy to study that branch of art; and drew one or two mediocre landscapes. We have undertaken to speak of painters only, and must leave the joiner's apprentice, who built Whitehall, to other hands. But William Dobson, "the English Tintoret," far more truthfully the English Vandyck, deserves a high place among Charles' clients.

Walking one day along Snow Hill, Sir Anthony Vandyck, then a successful painter, making a large income, caught_sight of a picture in a shop window, and stopped to look at it. It was worth a second look, nay, it was worth the trouble of going into the shop and asking the name and address of the artist. Having found these out, Sir Anthony, with a love of adventure, determined to visit the painter. He went to the address given, mounted flight after flight of steps in an old house, in a poor neighbourhood, and in an ill-furnished room found a starving painter behind his easel. The handsome face, with long acquiline features, and the look of care in the large dark eyes, made their impression on the successful Court painter. His generous heart felt for a fellow-artist in distress; and he offered him the hand of fellowship. The obscure painter was William Dobson, the son of a poor gentleman of good rank at St Albans, who, to gain his bread, had been bound apprentice to Robert Peake, a picture-seller near Holborn Bridge. Peake was a bad artist, but a good royalist, and, in after years, wielded his sword with better success than his pencil, fought for the King, defended and was taken prisoner at Basing-house, and was knighted at Oxford in 1645. Dobson was born in Holborn in 1610, and from Peake he learned the rudiments of painting; and is said to have studied later under Francis Cleyn. But though he gained little by the instruction of the loyal picture-dealer, he learned in his shop the works, if not the words, of great masters;

and the grandeur of Titian, and the elegance of Vandyck, taught their copyist the best parts of their art. Sir Anthony found him worthy of his generosity, took him from his wretched lodging, and supplied him with the necessaries to pursue his occupation in peace. He afterwards introduced him to Charles, and Dobson was made. On the death of Vandyck, he was appointed serjeantpainter; and, in 1642, accompanied the King to Oxford, where Charles and Prince Rupert sat to him. The young artist had already achieved his reputation as a portrait-painter, and was almost as great a favourite as Vandyck. But Dobson, like his friend, was extravagant; and ere long Charles was too embarrassed to help him. He fell into debt, and was thrown into prison, from which he was released only to die in 1646, at the early age of thirty-six. Had he lived longer, and studied under a good master; still more, had he visited Italy, as Rubens and Vandyck had, there is little doubt that William Dobson might have taken his place by the side of those masters. As it is, he is the best painter that England produced before Hogarth. He painted chiefly portraits; but his taste for historical subjects is shown in the manner in which he grouped his sitters.

There were many other artists, English as well as foreign, who lived in this reign and worked in this country; and it is quite possible that in old Whitehall days Charles may have employed several whom we have not mentioned. We have contented ourselves with bringing forward the most worthy of notice; and believe we have shown that, whatever Charles' faults as a monarch, as an encourager of art and cultivator of taste, he holds a very high, perhaps the highest place in the history of our civilisation.

1 Sir Balthasar Gerbier, a Fleming, who was diplomat, spy, and general agent, besides being a miniature-painter, and Nicholas Lauiere, an Italian portrait-painter, employed by Charles to make purchases in Italy, also the chief court musician, have been omitted for want of space.

ART. III.-The Third Part of the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus. Now first edited by W. CURETON, M.A., F.R.S., Oxford, at the University Press: 1853.

Joannes, Bischof von Ephesos, der erste syrische Kirchenhistoriker, von J. P. LAND. Leyden: 1856.

HAD the church history of Bishop John of Ephesus been written in any language generally studied in this country, its publication could not have failed to excite general attention; for it is no barren summary of facts, compiled from other writers, but an account of the times in which the author himself lived, and of stirring events, in which he was one of the chief actors. And contemporary history has always an interest distinct from the actual importance of the facts themselves; for in it familiar names and persons again rise up before us, but no longer labelled and ticketed according to the sentence passed upon them in subsequent times, but as living men and women, animated by the spirit of their own age, and busy actors in a grand moving scene, the issue of which is still concealed from the eyes of the narrator. That the judgment of a contemporary is seldom to be relied upon, follows indeed necessarily from the admixture of present interests, and hopes and fears inseparable from men still in the very heat of the conflict; but, it is equally true, that it is the proper counterpoise to the tendency of after ages to judge men, not according to the period in which they lived, but by ideas of later origin, and by a standard which may be fairly applicable to the actors of the historian's own times, but which has nothing in common with the principles which really regulated the conduct of those about whom he writes.

And, besides this, the narrative of Bishop John occupies a space previously unfilled by any original authority; for no details had hitherto reached us of the ecclesiastical events of the reigns of Justin II., Tiberius, and Maurice. Of their predecessor Justinian, who, to the sapience of our wise King James added the superstition of a monk, we already knew more than enough in the antechamber tittle-tattle of Procopius; but thenceforward there was a long blank, until Dr Cureton exhumed these remains. Their writer was already known in ecclesiastical history, from having been employed by Justinian to convert the heathen in Asia-Minor, of whom he baptized seventy thousand in three or four years; and, subsequently, a similar office was intrusted to him at Constantinople: but in his old age he had to bear the brunt of the persecution directed against his party; and it was only when the milder virtues of Tiberius and Maurice restrained the fiery zeal of bishops and patriarchs, that he found rest for

General Contents of John's History.

57

his last few years in the capital, and set himself to write a history of the church for the use of his Syriac countrymen. Of this work most has perished, but the part preserved is that which alone would have much interest for us, the record namely of his own days.

The character of the chatty and somewhat credulous old man, as it appears in his own pages, is such as entirely to win our sympathy and confidence in his truthfulness and moderation; but his work is confused,-for which, however, he apologises on the ground of part of it being written while he was suffering persecution, and with his papers torn from him; and his judgment is not of a very high order. But the facts which he details are of the greatest interest-the troubles of the State devastated in the East by the victorious arms of Persia, and in the West by hordes of savage Avars, who, after defeating Tiberius, rode up to the very walls of Constantinople, and flung their javelins over them in insolent defiance; the troubles of the Church, rent by the Monophysite controversy and the ambitious schemes of the Patriarch of Constantinople; while this dark picture is relieved by the conversion of Nubia by a peaceful mission, in his narrative of which John has preserved for us the letters of the new converts, probably the first specimens of a species of literature now well known by the help of missionary magazines, and really wonderfully like similar productions in the present day. And, besides, the history is everywhere studded with episodes, giving us strange pictures of the manners and morals of the times, and disclosing to us unexpected facts respecting the strength even then-in the middle of the sixth century of the heathen element in opposition to Christianity, several of the leading men at court paying a secret allegiance to the old pagan gods; and what almost passes credence, a Christian patriarch accused of sacrificing to Jupiter; and a Christian mob, in pious excitement at the news, threatening to burn their own patriarch's house over his head for screening his compeer, and actually roasting alive, under the walls of the capital, two unhappy beings suspected of having taken part in pagan rites.

Notwithstanding, however, the interesting nature of Bishop John's narrative, we are not aware of attention having being called to it until the recent publication of Dr Land's little volume, and of some letters in a Netherland newspaper, detailing the conversion of Nubia, had made foreign scholars, at all events, aware of the general nature of its contents. Possibly, the promise of its accomplished editor to furnish us with an English translation, has made many wait who would otherwise have set themselves. to master the original; but, as this promise has not as yet been fulfilled, we purpose to put our readers in possession of an outline of the work.