disfigure alike the cathedral of the city and the wayside chapel of the mountain-pass; they flourish in religious communities, and are even tolerated in the seminaries for the education of the priests of the sanctuary. Bad, paltry, miserable taste has overrun the externals of religion like a plague; and to this state of deplorable degradation would these new men bind our desires and intellects, as if it were of God, and on a par with the noble works achieved in times of zeal and faith, and at a period when all the art and talent of Christendom was devoted to the one object of increasing the glory and magnificence of the great edifices devoted to the worship of Almighty God. Moreover, it is very important to observe the extraordinary similarity of idea that actuated the artists of all Christian countries during the middle ages. Making due allowance for climate and materials, the same ruling spirit presided over the arts of Italy and England. The same devout effigies, recumbent and praying, each robed in the flowing ecclesiastical habits of the order, may be seen in every old Italian church, as in our own cathedrals. There was no difference then between a Roman chasuble and an English chasuble, between a Roman mitre and an English mitre. The same beautiful forms and proportions reigned universal. Even where the Christians extended their conquests in the East, in the city of Jerusalem itself, the edifices they raised were in architecture Pointed and Christian; some of which even still remain. Everywhere the Catholic might be traced by the works he raised; but now, alas, excepting by the extreme ugliness, and deformity, and paltry ornament, that are the usual characteristics of modern Catholic erections, it would be difficult to distinguish them from the recent productions of modern sects. Is it not a consideration that should fill every true Catholic heart with grief, that the propagation of the faith is no longer attended by the propagation of ecclesiastical traditions? Every year what zealous missionaries depart for distant climes, bearing with them, indeed, the true principles of faith, but with it the most degraded externals possible. The sources from whence they supply themselves are the magazines of Lyons and Paris, places filled with objects made entirely on the principle of cheap magnificence, uncanonical in form and often in material, hideous in design, utter departures from the beautiful models of mediæval antiquity, calculated only to please the vulgar and the ignorant, dazzling in the eyes of savages, but revolting to every man of true ecclesiastical knowledge and feeling. These things are not only expedited to the colonies and even to the antipodes to form in any mission a fresh nucleus of deplorable taste and ideas, but they inundate the sister island itself; yes, in Ireland, where, even in times considered barbarous, the ancient goldsmiths wrought exquisitely cunning