rightly, Mr Pugin assigns the triumph of English architecture to this troublous epoch. Nor, although Juan I., Pedro the Cruel, and Juan II., were admirers and patrons of painting, was it to royal or noble favour that Spanish art owed its chiefest obligations. The church--which, after the great iconoclastic struggle of the eighth century, had steadily acted on the Horatian maxim, "Segnius irritant animos demissa per aures, Quam quæ sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus"-- in Spain embraced the young and diffident art with an ardour and a munificence which, in its palmiest and most prosperous days, that art never forgot, and was never wearied of requiting. Was it so in England? and do we owe our lack of ancient English pictures to the reforming zeal of our iconoclastic reformers? Did the religious pictures of our Rincons, our Nuñez, and our Borgoñas, share the fate of the libraries that were ruthlessly destroyed by the ignorant myrmidons of royal rapacity? If so, it is almost certain that the records which bewail and denounce the fate of books and manuscripts, would not pass over the destruction of pictures; while it is still more certain that the monarch and his courtiers would have appropriated to themselves the pictured saints, no less than the holy vessels, of monastery and convent. It cannot, therefore, be said that the English Reformation deprived our national school of painting of its most munificent patrons, and most ennobling and purest subjects, in the destruction of the monasteries, and the spoliation of churches. That the Church of England, had she remained unreformed, might, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have emulated her Spanish or Italian sister in her patronage of, and beneficial influence upon, the arts of painting and sculpture, it is needless either to deny or assert; we fear there is no room for contending that, since the Reformation, she has in any way fostered, guided, or exalted either of those religious arts. In Spain, on the contrary, as Mr Stirling well points out, it was under the august shadow of the church that painting first raised her head, gained her first triumphs, executed her most glorious works, and is even now prolonging her miserable existence.