Charles I. was a great lover and patron of the fine arts, and during his reign they made rapid advances in England; but the blind zeal of the Puritans dispersed his splendid gallery, and destroyed almost every vestige of art. In the Journal of the House, July 23d, 1645, it is “Ordered, that all pictures having the second person of the Trinity, be burnt.” Walpole relates that “one Blessie was hired at half-a-crown a day to break the painted windows in Croydon church.” One _Dowsing_ was employed from June 9th, 1642, to October 4th, 1644, in this _holy_ business, and by calculation it is found that he and his agents had destroyed about 4660 pictures, evidently not all glass, because when they were glass he so specified them. “The result of this continued persecution,” says Haydon, “was the ruin of high art, for the people had not taste enough to feel any sympathy for it independently of religion, and every man who has pursued it since, who had not a private fortune, and was not supported by a pension, like West, became infallibly ruined.” PAINTINGS EVANESCENT. “Few works are more evanescent than paintings. Sculpture retains its freshness for twenty centuries. The Apollo and the Venus are as they were. But books are perhaps the only productions of man coeval with the human race. Sophocles and Shakspeare can be produced and reproduced forever. But how evanescent are paintings, and must necessarily be! Those of Zeuxis and Apelles are no more, and perhaps they have the same relation to Homer and Æschylus, that those of Raffaelle and Guido have to Dante and Petrarch. “There is however, one refuge from the despondency of this contemplation. The material part, indeed, of their works must perish, but they survive in the mind of man, and the remembrances of them are transmitted from generation to generation. The poet embodies them in his creations, and the systems of philosophers are modeled to gentleness by their contemplation; opinion, that legislator, is infected with their influence; men become better and wiser; and the unseen seeds are perhaps thus sown which shall produce a plant more excellent than that from which they fell.”--_Shelley._ There is at least another _refuge_. Paintings are now rendered as permanent as books by engraving, or statuary, by mosaics. In the time of Pliny, there were Greek paintings in Rome 600 years old. There is a painting at Florence dated 886. It is also to be hoped that christianity and civilization have made such advances, that no more Goths, Vandals, Turks, and fanatics, will take pleasure in demolishing works of art as in ages past. THE ENGLISH NATIONAL GALLERY.