which will not chemically react, giving the colors time to harden after laying on each successive coat; and above all, to use no varnishes in the process, nor after the completion of the work, till it is sufficiently hardened by age. THE INFLUENCE OF THE INQUISITION UPON SPANISH PAINTING. A strong and enthusiastic feeling of a religious character has often inspired the Fine Arts: we owe to such sentiments the finest and purest productions of modern painting. Progress in art, however, implies the study of nature; the study of nature and the exhibition of its results have continually shocked the rigid asceticism of a severe morality--a morality which makes indecency depend on the simple fact of exposure, not on the feeling in which the work is conceived. Scrupulous persons often appear unconscious that in this, as in other things, it is easy to observe the letter, and to violate the spirit. A picture or statue may be perfectly decent, so far as regards drapery, and yet suggest thoughts and ideas far more objectionable than those resulting from the contemplation of figures wholly unclothed. Still, it must be admitted that such a jealousy of the fine arts might reasonably exist in Italy at the end of the 15th, and the beginning of the 16th centuries, in the days of Alexander VI., Julius II., and Leo X.; when all the abominations of heathenism prevailed at Rome in practice, and when Christianity can hardly be said to have existed more than in theory. It would have been strange, amidst such universal depravity, that Art should escape unsullied by the general pollution. Still, it was against the _abuses_ of art that the efforts of the Catholic church under Paul IV. were directed; and while those efforts gave a somewhat different character to the subjects and to their treatment in later schools, they cannot be said to have acted on either Painting or Sculpture with any _repressive_ force.