number of illustrations and examples, in proof of that principle which I have laid down.

I will begin first, then, with illustrations from metal work. Now, the period in which there was the greatest perfection in this sort of work, as is universally acknowledged, is from about the fourteenth century— 1300, I think to 1600, or at least after 1500. It is singular that, in that period, five at least, very probably more-but we have it recorded of five of the most distinguished sculptors whose works are now the most highly prized, that they were ordinary working goldsmiths and silversmiths. This is given us in their respective biographies: Benvenuto Cellini, Luca della Robbia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and Baccio Bandinelli, all of whom were goldsmiths and workers at first, developed most extraordinary talent as sculptors. How was this done? Can we conceive a person who is merely a workman, working upon such plate as is put before him, becoming a man of high first-class character in art? There have been examples, but they are rare. But here we have five men, in a limited period, becoming most eminent. Now, what was the reason of that? It was because the jeweler, the silversmith, who worked with his hands, was educated, not only as an artist, but an artist of the highest class; and Vasari observes, in the life of Bandinelli, that in those times no man was reputed a good goldsmith who was not a good draughtsman, and who could not work as well in relief. We have a principle then established, that the person who did the material work in the finer works was an artist, who could not only draw, but model, and did the same with the metal itself; for that is the nature of that class of work of which I have spoken.

Now, take the life of Cellini. Here was a man who originally was put to a totally different employment. His father had no higher ambition concerning him than that he should become a great player upon the flute; and he teased him during all the last years of his life because he had no taste for this, and would run after goldsmiths and others, and learn the different branches of their profession. He led the most wonderful

He was to day at Rome; next day at Florence; then he was at Naples; then at Venice; then in France; then back again: that he could have done any work, in fact, seems incredible to any one who reads his life. And he did not travel by train or any public conveyance which could take on his luggage. He traveled on horseback each time, from Rome all the way to Paris. He had no luggage; he was a poor man, and whenever he came and started his shop, he began by making his own tools; and he worked with his scholars, who were generally young men that became themselves eminent in the profession, in a little open shop, looking to the street; there he himself hammered and carved and cast and shaped, and did whatever else was necessary for the work. He was an actual working goldsmith; and the beauty of his works consists in this, that they have the impress of genius so marked upon them, that they never could have been designed by one person and executed by an

other. There is as much art in the finish by his own hand, in every enamel, in the setting of every stone, as there is in the entire design; nor does he ever dream of talking of himself in any other way; and yet how he went on from step to step, until at length he produced the most magnificent works, on the largest scale, in marble and in bronze! He describes how he constructed his own Perseus. He went to buy his own wood, and saw it brought; and when he was casting that most exquisite statue of Perseus, which is still one of the wonders of art, he had every sort of misfortune. His furnace blew up, the roof was blown off, and the rain came in torrents upon the fire just the moment that the metal was going to be poured in. By his ingenuity, his extraordinary contrivances, he baffled, it might appear, the whole chain of accidents, and brought out, almost without a flaw, that most perfect piece of workmanship. You may imagine to what a state he was reduced, when, the very moment that the metal was ready for pouring out, the explosion took place. He had no other resource but to run to his kitchen, as he says, and to take every piece of copper, to the amount of two hundred porringers and different sorts of kettles, and throw them into the fire; and from these that splen did statue came forth. There was genius.

As a curious instance of the most extraordinary ingenuity, he tells us that on one occasion a surgeon came into his shop to perform an operation on the hand of one of his pupils. Upon looking at his instruments, he found them, as they were in those days, so exceedingly rude and clumsy, that he said, "If you will only wait half an hour, I will make you a better instrument;" and he went into his workshop, and took a piece of steel, and brought out a most beautifully finished knife, with which the operation was successfully performed, Now this man, at the time you see him thus working in his shop as a common workman, was modeling in the most exquisite manner in wax; spending his evenings in the private apartments of the Grand Duke, modeling in his presence, and assist ing him with a hundred little trifles which are now considered treasures of art. And so wherever he was, and under all circumstances, he acted as an artist, but at the same time as a truly laboring artisan. It was the same with others in the same profession. He was not the only man, by any means, whose genius was so universal; because we find him telling us repeatedly that the moment he heard of some goldsmith (and in those days a goldsmith was really an artist, as I have already said) who excelled in any particular branch of art, he determined to excel him. Thus it was that he grew to rival the medals of one, the enamels of another, the peculiar manner of putting foil to precious stones of another; and, in fact, there was not a branch of art which he did not consider it his duty to excel in. With this spirit, is it wonderful that men of really great taste should have been produced? men who, you observe, looked upon every branch of productive art as really a branch of the higher art of design; and thus in their own persons combined that art with the power of the tool; were artists as well as artisans.

There is another celebrated jeweler of that time, whom he mentions frequently, of the name of Antonio Foppo, a Milanese, who is better known in the history of art by a name which he received in derision in Spain, the name of Capodursa, which means a bear's face, and which he is known by, commonly, in works of art. Cellini describes to us the processes by which he produces his works; and they are so careful, and require such accurate knowledge of art, that his knowledge must have been very superior indeed in the arts of design. As an instance of what was the latitude and the extent of art, and how really a jeweler or goldsmith in those days was not above work which in our days no one would dare offer to a person of such a profession, we have a case recorded in the history of one of the painters, Pierino del Vaga, by Vasari, speaking of a very particular friend of Pierino's, a goldsmith. When the Grand Duke of Tuscany was building his palace, he gave to this man a commission to make the metal blinds for the ground floor of that palace; (and it is considered a great pity that a work of so homely a nature should have perished, because there can be no doubt whatever that it was a work of exquisite beauty.) So that, even upon what would be considered the lowest stage of common production, the artist did not feel it was beneath him to design; not to give a design to others, but to execute it himself. We have in the collections, particularly of Italy, in the palaces, evident proofs of the great extent to which this combination of various arts must have been carried, in works exceedingly complicated, extremely beautiful, and at the same time necessarily requiring a great deal of ability to execute. Those are the rich cabinets in which may be found, mixed together, work in marble, and in ivory, in wood, in metals, in enamel, and in painting, all combined together by one idea, and all executed by one hand, but of the authors of which it seems impossible to find any good trace. They probably were produced by those men called goldsmiths, and who, as I said before, could work as well upon any of those substances, and thus bring them harmoniously to form one beautiful whole.

Now, proceeding from what is most precious in art to what is more homely, let us return for a moment to a subject on which I have already touched. I have spoken of the beauty of the productions of antiquity in metal, which were found in the excavation particularly of those two buried museums, as we may call them, of antiquity, Pompeii and Herculaneum. The collection of these is chiefly in Naples. Except where presents have been made to other countries, they have been jealously kept together. Now, these different objects have not been dug out of temples or out of palaces, but they have been taken out of every sort of house-houses evidently belonging to the citizensand I think you may see that there is not one in that collection which does not immediately arrest the eye both by the beauty of form and by its exquisite fancy. Many of them have been engraved in the publication called the "Museo Borbonico," the Bourbon Museum, the Museum

of Naples; and I think very justly the remark is made by the editor in the fifth volume, that the whole modern civilized world, however vast it may be, and however it may labor in so many arts and so many trades, does not and cannot exhibit even a small proportion of that elegance and ornament, varied in a thousand ways, and in innumerable most fantastic modes, which are to be admired in the remains of furniture found in Pompeii and Herculaneum-two cities which occupied so insignificant a place in the ancient world. That is quite true. Now, what are we to infer from this? There can be no doubt, as I have said, on examining these beautiful objects, that they have been for common use. There are scales, steelyards, which can only have been made. to weigh provisions; the chains are most delicately worked; the weight is frequently a head with a helmet, most beautifully chiseled; and so genuine and true are these, so really intended for every-day use, that one of them has stamped upon it yet, the authentication made at the capitol of the weights being just. This was a steelyard which was in the kitchen, and it was for the ordinary purposes of the house. There are other large vessels which must have served for culinary purposes, and of which the handles and the rings and the different parts are finished far beyond what the finest bronzes that are made now in Paris can equal. What are we to conclude? You do not suppose these were the designs of the Flaxmans and the Baileys of that day. Who ever heard of a great artist in Pompeii and Herculaneum? And how can you imagine that every house furnished itself with what were considered exquisite and extraordinary specimens of art for the use of their every-day life? And then, where are their common utensils, if these are not they? If these lamps were not what they burnt, if these candelabra were not the shafts upon which they were hung, if these vessels were not those in which they prepared their viands, where are those? Were they carried away in the flight? But the most precious would surely be carried away, and the commoner be left behind. Nothing of the sort. One may see here everything is to be found; and everything is beautiful in shape, and generally in finish. What are we to conclude? Why, nothing less than that the braziers who made these things were able to make them. They came from the hands of the brass-founder; they have been chiseled in the workshop; they have been finished, not to be put up in cabinets, but in order to be knocked about by servants. Then here we have a state of art in which the producer, the man who makes, who manipulates, who handles the object of manufacture which he produces, was able to do what now defies almost our most superior workmen.

Now let us go to another part of the world, and come to a later period. Nuremberg, during the time which I have specified-between 1300 and the middle of 1500-was a center of art, and especially in all metal work. There is an observation of Hoffman, a German writer, that Nuremberg was the city in which the artist and the crafts

man walked most harmoniously hand in hand; but I think he does not go far enough; he ought to have said that it was a city in which the artisan and the artist were the most perfectly combined. At a very early period, that is, as early as 1355, there was produced a piece of work such as is at this day the admiration of all artists. And what was it? It was a mere well, a fountain in the public square; "the beautiful fountain," "the beautiful well," as it is to this day most justly called. Now, this was made entirely by the designer, by the artist himself, Höfer, who united in himself these two qualities; and it is acknowledged that in the treatment of the metal work, and in the beauty of the religious images which surround this fountain, but few steps have been made in art since that time. And he, as I observed, was a mere workman; he did his own work. At a later period-at what is considered the third period of art, in Nurembergthere is another remarkable piece of metal work; and I am glad to find that in the last report just published by the department of practical art, Mr. Smirke has introduced a letter in which he begs that this piece of workmanship, which he calls one of the most celebrated productions in metal, may be copied by casts, and brought to England as a specimen of art. Now that beautiful production was of as early a period as 1506; it was made between 1506 and 1519, and it is the shrine of St. Sebald, in his church at Nuremberg; an exquisite piece of work—so beautiful, so elegant, as that no iconoclasm had dared to touch it (though I must say that Nuremberg had been preserved from the reproach of that error)-but there it is, in its freshness and its beauty as it came from the artist's hand; in the center, a shrine of silver, in which is the body of the saint, and around it what may be called a cage or grating of the most perfect metal work, and with statues of most exquisite workmanship. Now I do wish this to be brought to Englanda copy, that is, of it-not merely because it will show what was done in ages that we consider hardly emerging from barbarism; not only what beautiful inspirations religion could give the artist; but because it will show to those who are trying to raise the character of any art the true principle upon which alone it can ever be raised to what it was then. They will see the artist portrayed upon it-Peter Vischer; they will see him with his apron on; they will see him with his chisel and his mallet in his hand; they will see that he aspires to nothing more than to be a handicraftsman, a workman in metal, who yet could conceive, and then design, this most magnificent production of man's hand.

Another example, something of the same sort, we shall find in a neighboring country. There is at Antwerp, likewise, a beautiful well near the cathedral; and if you ask who it was that produced this, you will hear that it was one who sometimes had been known as a painter, and at others, under the more familiar appellation of the "Blacksmith of Antwerp," as a blacksmith; and there is a piece of iron-work which I fear that not our most perfect works could turn out-certainly not, nothing that could be compared with it. And Quintin Matsys was