Stray Studies from England and ItalyGreene, John Richard
History
Stray Studies from England and Italy
Greene, John Richard
Italy -- Description and travel
The attitude of the primates indeed showed that sooner or later such a
reformation was inevitable. From the moment when Wyclif stood in
Lambeth Chapel the Church sank ecclesiastically as well as politically
into non-existence. It survived merely as a vast landowner, whilst its
primates, after a short effort to resume their older position as real
heads of their order, dwindled into ministers and tools of the Crown.
The Gate-tower of the house, the grand mass of brickwork, whose dark red
tones are (or, alas! were till a year or two since) so exquisitely
brought out by the grey stone of its angles and the mullions of its
broad arch-window, recalls an age--that of its builder, Archbishop
Morton--when Lambeth, though the residence of the first minister of the
crown, had really lost all hold on the nobler elements of political
life. It was raised from this degradation by the efforts of a primate to
whose merits justice has hardly as yet been done. First in date among
the genuine portraits of the Archbishops of Canterbury which hang round
the walls of the Guard-room at Lambeth is the portrait of Archbishop
Warham. The plain, homely old man's face still looks down on us line for
line as the "seeing eye" of Holbein gazed on it three centuries ago. "I
instance this picture," says Mr. Wornum, in his life of the painter, "as
an illustration that Holbein had the power of seeing what he looked on,
and of perfectly transferring to his picture what he saw." Memorable in
the annals of art as the first of that historic series which brings home
to us as no age has ever been brought home to eyes of aftertime the age
of the English Reformation, it is even more memorable as marking the
close of the great intellectual movement which the Reformation swept
away.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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