There is another observation of Wilkie's which merits our notice: "Could their system serve, which I think it may, as the border minstrelsy did Sir Walter Scott, it would be to any student a most admirable groundwork for a new style of art." This somewhat hasty hint must be cautiously received. The very absence of technical excellence interests us in the formal compositions and flat surfaces of the early masters. We feel that movement and distance, foreshortening and relief, symmetry and contrast, tone and effect, are scarcely wanted, where "a truth of actuality is fearlessly sacrificed to a truth of feeling." We are forced to admit that men who regarded form but as the vehicle of expression, attained a severe grandeur, a noble repose, very different from exaggerated action. Archaisms of style are, however, ill suited to our times. Originally significant, they are now an affectation--the offspring of penury or perverted taste, rather than of spiritual purity. So must they seem in modern productions, affectedly divested of the artificial means and improved methods which centuries of progress have developed, by artists who forget their academic studies and neglect the contour of the living model, without attaining the old inspiration. The spirit which animated devotional limners being long dead, any imitation of their style must be mechanical--a reproduction of its mannerism after its motives are extinct. Whilst, therefore, I endeavour to point out the merits of the old religious limners, it is with no wish to see their manner revived. Among a generation whose faith has been remodelled, whose social and intellectual habits have been entirely revolutionised, the restoration of purist painting would be a mockery. But it should not, therefore, be forbidden us to study and sympathise with forms which, though rigid and monotonous, were sufficient to express the simple faith of early times, and in which earnestness compensates the absence of skill, and fervour the lack of power.