[Footnote A:  Sismondi relates that the bed of the river Arno, at Florence, was transformed into a representation of the Gulf of Hell, in the year 1304; and that all the variety of suffering that monkish imagination had invented was apparently inflicted on real persons, whose shrieks and groans gave fearful reality to the appalling scene.—­ED.]

There are accidents to which genius is liable, and by which it is frequently suppressed in a people.  The establishment of the Inquisition in Spain at one stroke annihilated all the genius of the country.  Cervantes said that the Inquisition had spoilt many of his most delightful inventions; and unquestionably it silenced the wit and invention of a nation whose proverbs attest they possessed them even to luxuriance.  All the continental nations have boasted great native painters and architects, while these arts were long truly foreign to us.  Theoretical critics, at a loss to account for this singularity, accused not only our climate, but even our diet, as the occult causes of our unfitness to cultivate them.  Yet Montesquieu and Winkelmann might have observed that the air of fens and marshes had not deprived the gross feeders of Holland and Flanders of admirable artists.  We have teen outrageously calumniated.  So far from any national incapacity, or obtuse feelings, attaching to ourselves in respect to these arts, the noblest efforts had long been made, not only by individuals, but by the magnificence of Henry VIII., who invited to his court Raphael and Titian; but unfortunately only obtained Holbein.  A later sovereign, Charles the First, not only possessed galleries of pictures, and was the greatest purchaser in Europe, for he raised their value, but he likewise possessed the taste and the science of the connoisseur.  Something, indeed, had occurred to our national genius, which had thrown it into a stupifying state, from which it is yet hardly aroused.  Could those foreign philosophers have ascended to moral causes, instead of vapouring forth fanciful notions, they might have struck at the true cause of the deficiency in our national genius.  The jealousy of puritanic fanaticism had persecuted these arts from the first rise of the Reformation in this country.  It had not only banished them from our churches and altar-pieces, but the fury of the people, and the “wisdom” of parliament, had alike combined to mutilate and even efface what little remained of painting and sculpture among us.  Even within our own times this deadly hostility to art was not extinct; for when a proposal was made gratuitously to decorate our places of worship by a series of religious pictures, and English artists, in pure devotion to Art, zealous to confute the Continental calumniators, asked only for walls to cover, George the Third highly approved of the plan.  The design was put aside, as some had a notion that the cultivation of the fine arts in our naked churches was a return to Catholicism.  Had this glorious plan been realized,