STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

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and the inductivefaculty coexisted in such supreme excellenceand perfect harmony. Perhaps in an age of Scotists and Tho-mists even his intellect might have run to waste, as many intel-lects ran to waste which were inferior only to his. Happily thespirit of the age on which his lot was cast, gave the right di-rection to his mind; and his mind reacted with tenfold force onthe spirit of the age. In the year 1C85 his fame, though splen-did, was only dawning; but his genius was in the meridian. Hisgreat work, that work which effected a revolution in the mostimportant provinces of natural philosophy, had been com-pleted, but was not yet published, and was just about to be sub-mitted to the consideration of the Royal Society.

It is not very easy to explain why the nation which was so sta i e „ffar before its neighbours in science should in art have been farbehind them all. Yet such was the fact. It is true that inarchitecture, an art which is half a science, an art in whichnone but a geometrician can excel, an art which has nostandard of grace but what is directly or indirectly dependenton utility, an art of which the creations derive a part, at least,of their majesty from mere bulk, our country could boast ofone truly great man, Christopher Wren; and the fire which laidLondon in ruins had given him an opportunity, unprecedentedin modern history, of displaying his powers. The austerebeauty of the Athenian portico, the gloomy sublimity of theGothic arcade, he was, like almost all his contemporaries, in-capable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of appreciating:but no man, born on our side of the Alps, has imitated with somuch success the magnificence of the palacelike churches ofItaly. Even the superb Lewis has left to posterity no workwhich can bear a comparison with Saint Paul’s. But at the /close of the reign of Charles the Second there was not a singleEnglish painter or statuary whose name is now remembered.

This sterility is somewhat mysterious; for painters and sta-tuaries were by no means a despised or an ill paid class. Their