By the Protestant mind, nursed, perhaps, in an undue contempt of histories of saints and martyrs of the Romish Church, the treasures of art of the best period are rarely understood, and still more rarely felt, in the spirit in which they were conceived. Those for whom they were painted needed no cold inquiry into the subjects. They accepted them as things universally known and religiously to be received, with a veneration which we but little comprehend. With them pictures and statues were among their sacred things, and, together with architecture, spoke and taught with an authority that books, which then were rare in the people's hands, have since scarcely ever obtained. Men of genius felt this respect paid to their works, if denied too often to themselves; and thus to their own devotion was added a kind of ministerial importance. Their work became a duty, and was very frequently prosecuted as such by the inmates of monasteries. Besides their works on a large scale, upon the walls and in their cloisters, the ornamenting and illustrating missals embodied a religious feeling, if in some degree peculiar to the condition of the workers, of a vital form and beauty. Treasures of this kind there are beyond number; but they have been hidden treasures for ages. A Protestant contempt for their legends has persecuted, with long hatred, and subsequent long indifference, the art which glorified them. And now that we awake from this dull state, and begin to estimate the poetry of religious art, we stand before the noblest productions amazed and ignorant, and looking for interpreters, and lose the opportunity of enjoyment in the inquiry. Art is too valuable for all it gives, to allow this entire ignorance of the subjects of its favourite treatment. If, for the better understanding of heathen art, an acquaintance with classical literature is thought to be a worthy attainment, the excellence of what we may term Christian art surely renders it of importance that we should know something about the subjects of which it treats. The inquiry will repay us also in other respects, as well as with regard to taste. If we would know ourselves, it is well to see the workings of the human mind, under its every phase, its every condition. And in such a study we shall be gratified, perhaps unexpectedly, to find the good and the beautiful still shining through the obscurity of many errors, predominant and influential upon our own hearts, and scarcely wish the fabulous altogether removed from the minds of those who receive it in devotion, lest great truth in feeling be removed also. Indeed, the legends themselves are mostly harmless, and, even as they become discredited, may be interpreted as not unprofitable allegories. Had we not, in a Puritanic zeal, discarded art with an iconoclast persecution, _The Pilgrim's Progress_ had long ere this been a "golden legend" for the people, and spoken to them in worthy illustration; nor would they have been religiously