or the moment we refer to their ancient religious signification and influence, must it be with disdain or with pity?  This, as it appears to me, is to take not a rational, but rather a most irrational, as well as a most irreverent, view of the question:  it is to confine the pleasure and improvement to be derived from works of art within very narrow bounds; it is to seal up a fountain of the richest poetry, and to shut out a thousand ennobling and inspiring thoughts.  Happily there is a growing appreciation of these larger principles of criticism as applied to the study of art.  People look at the pictures which hang round their walls, and have an awakening suspicion that there is more in them than meets the eye—­more than mere connoisseurship can interpret; and that they have another, a deeper significance than has been dreamed of by picture dealers and picture collectors, or even picture critics.—­Introd. xxiii.

On these grounds Mrs. Jameson treats of the Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art.  Her first volume contains a general sketch of the legends connected with angels, with the scriptural personages, and the primitive fathers.  Her second, the histories of most of “those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disfigured by poetical embroidery that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings.”  Each story is followed by a series of short but brilliant criticisms on those pictures in which the story has been embodied by painters of various schools and periods, and illustrated by numerous spirited etchings and woodcuts, which add greatly to the value and intelligibility of the work.  A future volume is promised which shall contain the “legends of the monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, considered merely in their connection with the revival and the development of the fine arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries”—­a work which, if it equal the one before us, will doubtless be hailed by those conversant with that wonderful phase of human history as a valuable addition to our psychologic and aesthetic literature.

We ought to petition, also, for a volume which should contain the life of the Saviour, and the legends of the Virgin Mary; though this latter subject, we are afraid, will be too difficult for even Mrs. Jameson’s tact and delicacy to make tolerable to English readers, so thoroughly has the Virgin Mary, as especial patroness of purity, been intermixed in her legends with every form of prudish and prurient foulmindedness. {199}