REDUCED FACSIMILE OF FRONT PAGE OF NO. 26 OF "A PERFECT DIURNALL." (About three-fourths the size of the original.)

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If the Civil War in England was auspicious to liberty, it was disastrous to art. From the time of Henry VIII. the British monarchs had shown a decided taste for the arts. Henry had munificently patronised Holbein, and had made various purchases of foreign chefs-d'œuvre. Prince Henry inherited the taste of his mother, instead of the coarse buffoonery of his father, and showed a strong attachment to men of genius and to works of genius. He began a collection of paintings, bronzes, and medals, which fell to his brother Charles. Charles was an enthusiast in art, and had he not possessed his fatal passion for despotism, would have introduced a new era in England as regarded intellectual and artistic pursuits. The study of Italian models, both in literature and art, by the aristocracy, enabled the nobles to embrace the tastes of the monarch; and England would soon have seen the fine arts flourishing to a degree which they had never enjoyed before, and which would have prevented the dark ages that succeeded. During Charles's early rule the greatest artists of the Continent flocked over to England, and found a liberal reception there. Rubens, Vandyck, Jansen, Vansomer, Mytens, Diepenbeck, Pölemberg, Gentileschi, and others visited London, and Vandyck, the greatest of them all, remained permanently. The works of Vandyck, in England, are numerous, and if we except his famous picture of "The Crucifixion" at Mechlin, we possess the best of his productions. At Windsor Castle, Hampton Court, Blenheim, Wilton House, and Wentworth House, the bulk of his finest pictures are to be seen. His portraits of our princes and the chief nobility of the time are familiar to all English eyes, and place him only second to Titian in that department. At Wilton House alone there are twenty-five of Vandyck's paintings; the portrait of Philip, Earl of Pembroke, with his family, is declared by Walpole to be itself a school of this master. His dramatic portrait of Strafford and his secretary, Mainwaring, at Wentworth House, Walpole asserts to be his masterpiece. Charles had proposed to him to paint the history of the Order of the Garter on the walls of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, but the sum he demanded—said to be eighty thousand pounds, but more probably a misprint for eight thousand pounds—caused Charles to delay it, and his political troubles soon put an end to the scheme. He painted several pictures of Charles on horseback, one of which is at Windsor, and another at Hampton Court.

Rubens came to England only as an ambassador, but Charles seized the opportunity to get him to paint the apotheosis of James, on the ceiling of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. This he, however, merely sketched whilst in London and painted it at Antwerp, receiving three thousand pounds for it. The Duke of Buckingham purchased Rubens's private collection of pictures, chiefly of the Italian school, but containing some of his own, for ten thousand pounds. These were sold by the Long Parliament, and now adorn the palaces of the Escurial at Madrid, and the Belvedere at Vienna. The large pictures in the latter gallery, "St. Francis Xavier preaching to the Indians," and "Loyola casting out Devils," are amongst the very finest of his productions.

Charles, besides making collections, and drawing round him great artists, projected the establishment of an academy of arts on a princely scale. But this remained only an idea, through the breaking out of the Revolution. Parliament, in 1645, caused all such pictures at Whitehall as contained any representation of the Saviour or the Virgin to be burnt, and the rest to be sold. Fortunately there were persons in power who had more rational notions, and much was saved. Cromwell himself secured the cartoons of Raphael for three hundred pounds, and thus preserved them to the nation, and as soon as he had the authority, he put a stop to the sale of the royal collections, and even detained many pictures that had been sold.

The native artists of this period were chiefly pupils of Rubens or Vandyck. Jamesone, called the Scottish Vandyck, was a pupil of Rubens at the same time with Vandyck—Charles sat to him. William Dobson, a pupil of Vandyck, was serjeant-painter to Charles, and Robert Walker, of the Vandyck school, was Cromwell's favourite painter, to whom we owe several admirable portraits of the Protector. There were also several miniature painters of the highest merit—the two Olivers, Hoskins, and Cooper.

Up to this period engravings had become by no means prominent in England. That there had been engravers we know from various books having been illustrated by them. Geminus and Humphrey Lloyd were employed by Ortelius, of Antwerp, on his "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum." Aggas had executed a great plan of London, and Saxon county maps. Various Flemish and French engravers found employment, as Vostermans, De Voerst, and Peter Lombard. Hollar, a Bohemian, was employed extensively till the outbreak of the Civil War, and illustrated Dugdale and other writers. But the chief English engraver of this period was John Payne.

Sculpture was by no means in great advance at this period. There were several foreign artists employed in England on tombs and monuments, but as they did not at that date put their names upon them, it is difficult to attribute to every man his own. Amongst these Le Sœur, who executed the equestrian statue of Charles I. at Charing Cross, Angier, and Du Val were the chief. John Stone, master mason to the king, was by far the most skilful native sculptor. Amongst his best efforts are the monuments of Sir George Holles at Westminster, and the statue of Sir Finnes Holles, also at Westminster. Sir Dudley Carleton's tomb at Westminster, and Sutton's tomb at the Charterhouse are also his. But the greatest boon to sculpture was the introduction at this period, by the Earl of Arundel, of the remains of ancient art, hence called the Arundel Marbles.

This was the epoch of the commencement of classical architecture. The grand old Anglo-Gothic had run its course. It fell with the Catholic Church, or continued only in a mongrel and degraded state, showing continually the progress of its decline. From Henry VIII. to James this state of things continued; the miserable tasteless style, which succeeded the downfall of the picturesque Tudor, being the only architecture. The change to the classical was destined to be made by Inigo Jones, whose is the great name of this period. Jones had studied in Italy, and became aware of the graceful style which Vitruvius had introduced by modulation of the ancient Greek and Roman, and which Palladio had raised to perfection. The merit of Jones is that he imported Palladio's style substantially and completely, ready as it was to his hands, and wholly unknown in England. By this means Jones acquired a reputation for genius to which nothing that he has left justifies his claim. He was first engaged in designing the scenery and machinery of the masques which Ben Jonson wrote for the queen of James I. He was appointed architect to the queen and Prince Henry. On the death of the prince he went back to Italy, but on his return to London he was appointed Surveyor-General of the Royal Buildings. The first thing which he planned was the design for an immense palace for James on the site of Whitehall. There is a simple grandeur in the drawings of it which are left, which may fairly entitle him to a reputation for the introduction of an elegant domestic architecture, although it does not warrant the extravagant terms of eulogy which have been lavished on him. The only portion of this palace which was built is the Banqueting House (afterwards the Chapel Royal) at Whitehall, being the termination of the great façade, and which contains nothing very remarkable. Jones added a chapel to Somerset House, and a west front to St. Paul's, neither of which remains. That he was far from having conceived the true principles of architecture was shown by the fact that his west front of Old St. Paul's was a classical one engrafted on a Gothic building, and this solecism he was continually repeating. One of the most glaring instances of the kind is a classical screen which he raised in the Norman Cathedral of Durham. Amongst the chief remaining buildings of Inigo Jones from which an idea of his talent may be drawn, are the Piazza and St. Paul's Church, Covent Garden, of which Quatremere de Quincy says that the most remarkable thing about it is the reputation that it enjoys; Ashburnham House, Westminster; a house on the west side of Lincoln's Inn Fields originally built for the Earl of Lindsay; an addition to St. John's College, Oxford; and by far his finest work,—if his it be, which is doubtful—Heriot's Hospital at Edinburgh. He also superintended the erection of Old Greenwich Palace.

The general aspect of the towns and streets remained the same at this period as in the former. James issued proclamation after proclamation, ordering the citizens to leave off the half-timbered style, and build the fronts, at least, entirely of brick or stone; but this was little attended to, and many a strange old fabric continued to show the fashions of past ages.