Art of all kinds, not exclusively architectural, attracted him at once. At Paris the Louvre occupied him for days together; and it was characteristic of his taste (which always inclined to the real rather than the ideal) that, on the one hand, he passed by at once as “showy and unnatural” the then popular school of David and Gérard, and, on the other, devoted more attention to the grand historical series of Rubens’ pictures, the Claudes, and the Dutch pictures (which reminded him of Wilkie), than to those of a higher and more imaginative kind. At Rome (thanks to the kindness of Canova, to whom he had letters of introduction) he spent whole days in sketching among the antiquities, the sculptures, and the paintings of the Vatican, and of other galleries. In fact, at this time he often seemed to turn aside from architecture to woo the sister arts, although afterwards his own art gradually asserted an almost exclusive dominion, and he was accused, with some truth, of looking at the others as merely her handmaids. Travelling as he was in Italy, he could not fail to be impressed by the artistic influences of painting, sculpture, architecture, and, above all, of music, which the Church of Rome presses into the service of her religious ceremonies. He first saw these displayed (and he could hardly have seen them more gloriously) when he entered Milan Cathedral on the feast of St. Carlo. He had fuller opportunities still, in his long sojourn at Rome, of witnessing all the splendours of Christmas and Easter. They could not but appeal to his artistic tastes, and especially to his great love of music; but they seem never to have laid hold of his mind. The sense of the artificiality and cumbrousness of ceremony spoilt the effect to his taste; and neither the time nor his own disposition was such as to appreciate any devotion, in which superstition might appear to lurk, whether in the wayside chapels of Switzerland or under the dome of St. Peter’s itself. He felt in it occasionally “something awful and divine;” but his feeling was marred by the prevailing sense of unreality. Even his friend Pugin’s enthusiasm in after days, though it commanded respect, could win no real sympathy from him.