When we recollect that Mrs. Jameson achieved so much before the foundations of Christian archaeology had been fully laid; before de Rossi's monumental publications had supplied the means of interpreting early Christian sculpture; before critics and archaeologists were at one regarding the significance of early Christian and Middle Age symbolism, or agreed on the principles that were to guide to a correct understanding of the pictures of Roman and Gothic art, and while students were yet in ignorance as to the real influence of Byzantine art on that of western Europe, we cannot but wonder at the courage and the energy of this gifted woman in undertaking and in bringing to a happy issue a work which, even to-day, with all our increased facilities and greater array of facts, would be considered a herculean task. As we read her admirable volumes on _Sacred and Legendary Art_ we can, as did a close friend of hers, see the enraptured author "kindle into enthusiasm amidst the gorgeous natural beauty, the antique memorials and the sacred Christian relics of Italy," and we are prepared to believe, with the same friend, that there was not "a cypress on the Roman hills, or a sunny vine overhanging the southern gardens, or a picture in those vast somber galleries of foreign palaces, or a catacomb spread out, vast and dark, under the martyr churches of the City of the Seven Hills, which was not associated with some vivid flashes of her intellect and imagination." And we can also understand how "the strange, mystic symbolism of the early mosaics was a familiar language to her," and why she should experience special delight when she found herself "on the polished marble of the Lateran floor or under the gorgeously somber tribune of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, reading off the quaint emblems or expounding the pious thoughts of more than a thousand years ago."[219] It is gratifying to know that Queen Victoria recognized the surpassing merits of this noble woman by placing her on the civil list, and that our own Longfellow was able to say of her masterpiece, _Sacred and Legendary Art_, "It most amply supplies the cravings of the religious sentiment of the spiritual nature within." A countrywoman of Mrs. Jameson and her contemporary, who also deserves an honorable place in the literature of archaeology, is Louise Twining. Although inferior in intellectual attainments and literary activity to the accomplished author of _Sacred and Legendary Art_, her two works on _Types and Figures of the Bible Illustrated by Art_ and _Symbols and Emblems of Early Mediaeval Christian Art_ have given her a well-deserved reputation on the Continent as well as in the British Isles. The latter volume Mrs. Jameson herself declares in her _Legends of the Madonna_ to be "certainly the most complete and useful book of the kind which I know of."