sort of atheism to look upon them reckless of their significance, regardless of the influences through which they were produced, without acknowledgment of the mind which called them into being, without reference to the intention of the artist in his own creation. She acknowledges that the Madonna and Child is a subject so consecrated by its antiquity, so hallowed by its profound import, so endeared by its associations with the softest and deepest of our human sympathies, that the mind has never wearied of its repetition, nor the eye become satiated with its beauty. Those, she affirms, who refuse to give it the honour due to a religious representation, yet regard it with a tender, half-unwilling homage; and when the glorified type of what is purest, loftiest, holiest in womanhood, stands before us, arrayed in all the majesty and beauty that accomplished Art, inspired by faith and love, could lend her, and bearing her divine Son, rather enthroned than sustained on her maternal bosom, "we look, and the heart is in heaven!" and it is difficult, very difficult, to refrain from an Ora pro Nobis.
And where, amid the varieties and successive presentments of Art, does she find the "highest, holiest impersonation" of this glorious type of womanhood? She reviews the separate schools, and points out their distinctive features—the stern, awful quietude of the old Mosaics—the hard lifelessness of the degenerate Greek—the pensive sentiment of the Siena, and stately elegance of the Florentine Madonnas—the intellectual Milanese, with their large foreheads and thoughtful eyes—the tender, refined mysticism of the Umbrian—the sumptuous loveliness of the Venetian—the quaint characteristic simplicity of the early German—the intense life-like feeling of the Spanish—the prosaic, portrait-like nature of the Flemish schools; and so on. The realisation of Mrs. Jameson's ideal she finds not in the mere woman, nor yet in the mere idol: not in "those lovely creations which awaken a sympathetic throb of tenderness; nor in those stern, motionless types, which embody a dogma; not in the classic features of marble goddesses, borrowed as models; nor in the painted images which stare upon us from tawdry altars in flaxen wigs and embroidered petticoats." For anything of the latter class she has a proper ultimatum of contempt, artistic and religious both. Nor is she very tolerant of that seventeenth century school, from whose studies every trace of the mystical and solemn conception of antiquity gradually disappeared, till, for the majestic ideal of womanhood was substituted merely inane prettiness, or rustic, or even meretricious grace, the borrowed charms of some earthly exemplar—and thus in depicting the "Mourning Mother," the sentiment of beauty was allowed to predominate over that of the mother's agony—"and I have seen," she says, "the sublime Mater Dolorosa transformed into a merely beautiful and youthful maiden, with such an air of sentimental grief as might serve for the loss of a sparrow." Once then, and once only, has Mrs. Jameson seen realised her own ideal—in Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto—in which she recognises the transfigured woman, at once completely human and divine, an abstraction of power, purity, and love, poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; looking out, with her melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly-dilated, sibylline eyes, quite through the universe, to the end and consummation of all things—sad as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart through {{sc|Him}, now resting
