while with national pride I heard the admiring murmurs of the foreigners
who grouped around it (nothing, indeed, of which our nation may be more
proud had they seen in the Crystal Palace),--heard, with no less a pride
in the generous nature of fellow-artists, the warm applause of living and
deathless masters sanctioning the enthusiasm of the popular crowd, what
struck me more than the precision of drawing, for which the artist has
been always renowned, and the just, though gorgeous affluence of colour
which he has more recently acquired, was the profound depth of
conception, out of which this great work had so elaborately arisen. That
monk, with his scowl towards the printer and his back on the Bible over
which his form casts a shadow--the whole transition between the medieval
Christianity of cell and cloister, and the modern Christianity that
rejoices in the daylight, is depicted there, in the shadow that obscures
the Book, in the scowl that is fixed upon the Book-diffuser;--that
sombre, musing face of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, with the beauty of
Napoleon, darkened to the expression of a Fiend, looking far and
anxiously into futurity, as if foreseeing there what antagonism was about
to be created to the schemes of secret crime and unrelenting force; the
chivalrous head of the accomplished Rivers, seen but in profile, under
his helmet, as if the age when Chivalry must defend its noble attributes
in steel was already half passed away; and, not least grand of all, the
rude thews and sinews of the artisan forced into service on the type, and
the ray of intellect, fierce, and menacing revolutions yet to be,
struggling through his rugged features, and across his low knitted brow,
--all this, which showed how deeply the idea of the discovery in its good
and its evil, its saving light and its perilous storms, had sunk into the
artist's soul, charmed me as effecting the exact union between sentiment
and execution, which is the true and rare consummation of the Ideal in
Art. But observe, while in these personages of the group are depicted
the deeper and graver agencies implicated in the bright but terrible