INTRODUCTORY.

HE old Vasari wonders much, in his wise simple

fashion, over the sublime indifference to renown of artists earlier than he,-how, leaving their great works nameless, they have passed away, into the twilight, voicelessly, but for the still fair life breathed into the carved stone. Vasari fondly remembers how his master, Michael Angelo-because some ascribed the glory of the altar-piece, Pieta, to another—went, alone, to the Church at midnight, and carved, by a taper's light, his name on the marble drapery of the Virgin and the dead Christ.

Well for the history of Art if all had done likewise, thought Vasari as he wrote his famous lives, and paused in those ellipses where the work survived the workman, even in tradition most dim. And all who would add, however humbly, a stone to the cairn of Art, have thought, perhaps, with this old biographer, have wondered and desired as he.

A

A time-worn frieze suggests a story-no more. Was that strong man's agony a fact which the sculptor's own eyes attested? Did that meekness and sweetness of motherhood bless with a real presence some nook in the Abbey regality? These features frozen into stone, and that child's head long worn away into pitiful grotesque baldness and unbeauty, were they sometime happy memories or imaginings, or, it may be, sweet patient copies modelled from love's own? They stand in the white light still, but the artist's name is lost. We cannot speak of him; nor call the little daughter by name, nor the sister who was always a child gathering flowers upon the moss, or playing with the cool faint shadows of the lilies in the river near, who, passing forth too soon, should be for ever young in stone, living in the unseen light, living on the chapel frieze, as the child set in the midst, or the infant Timothy, or St. John. Yet, not to be for ever beautiful these, for the features moulder on the stone, moulder on the time-eaten walls of churches scattered far and wide,-meagre outlines of the ancient cherished forms, surviving both their beauty and their story--an old, old dream.

One architect's name indeed is preserved to us in some rude lines carved in Melrose Abbey,-a name, and that is all, seven hundred years old.

Obscure in the depths of obscurity, the Abbey of Paisley has stood; consigned-its partial completeness and constant use notwithstanding-to a fate of even deeper oblivion than has befallen most Scottish monasteries. Its rise with the royal Stewards, its first prestige and power;