It may be reasonably argued that the want of development of the plastic arts in England during the literary revival, was largely due to artificial restrictions. Fine paintings were ordered out of the churches by Elizabeth, and many were destroyed; while, following the lead of the court, there was little or no encouragement offered by the public to artists except perhaps in portraiture. Flaxman truly said of the destruction of works of art in this period, that the check to the national art in England occurred at a time which offered the most essential and extraordinary assistance to its progress. NOTE 7. PAGE 16 During the last half century or so, various writers of repute, including Ruskin and Dean Farrar, have professed to find in the poorer works of the Italian painters of the fourteenth century, and even in paintings of Margaritone and others of the previous century, evidence of strong religious emotion on the part of the artists. It is claimed that their purpose in giving simple solemn faces to their Madonnas and Saints, was "to tell the sacred story in all its beauty and simplicity"; that they possessed a "powerful sincerity of emotion"; that they "delivered the burning messages of prophecy with the stammering lips of infancy," and so on. It is proper to say that there is nothing to support this view of the early painters. We find no trace of any suggestions of the kind till the last of these artists had been dead for about four hundred years, while their lives, so far as we have any record, lend no warranty to the statements. The painters of the fourteenth century took their art seriously, but purely as a craft, and it was not uncommon with them to combine two or three other crafts with that of painting. They designed mostly sacred subjects for the simple reason that the art patrons of the day seldom ordered anything else. In their private lives they associated together, were generally agreeable companions, and not averse to an occasional escapade. Moreover the time in which they lived was notable for what we should call loose habits, and indeed from the thirteenth century to the end of the fifteenth, religious observances and practices were of a more hollow and formal character than they have ever been since.