CROSS-LEGGED EFFIGIES IN DORSET. 3 



and the subtle rendering of character which we call art. The 

 Reformation, with its great social and political upheaval, was 

 not calculated to have a beneficial effect on English sculpture ; 

 but it is a most remarkable fact that, while sculpture in England 

 declined beyond measure at this period, that of Italy, Spain, 

 Germany, and France rose to its highest excellence, and this, 

 notwithstanding that the pre-Reformation examples in England 

 are, generally speaking, more than equal to anything to be 

 found on the Continent. 



It may be that the Court patronage, extended exclusively to 

 foreign artists by the Tudor and Stuart Sovereigns, set a fashion 

 which was followed by less exalted persons, with the result that 

 the English sculptor was robbed of his means of obtaining a live- 

 lihood. Be this as it may, the English school of sculpture 

 became but a faint semblance of its former self, and was not the 

 only art that received its deathblow in the triumph of Puritanism. 



In the study of these memorials it is, I think, the general 

 tendency of the art displayed, its quality, its value as a mirror of 

 its own time, and its beauty in the higher sense that are the 

 main questions to be considered. It is fortunate, and a privilege 

 for which we cannot be too grateful, that we are able to 

 approach them in the congenial atmosphere of the sanctuaries 

 wherein they lie an atmosphere of serene contemplation, of 

 reverence, of sympathetic warmth and receptiveness, at once 

 necessary, nay, imperative, if the best that is in them is to be 

 drawn to the surface. 



It is a matter of some speculation as to how far the features 

 of the effigies may be accepted as faithful portraits of the 

 individuals they commemorate. The evolution of refinement 

 in sculptured or any other form of portraiture can only be 

 effected by a deep and subtle investigation of the laws of the 

 human mind and the sources of its pain and pleasures in 

 material objects, supplemented by a most studious collation 

 and accumulation of the principles of proportion, and of the 

 attributes of the human form. There was, and is, no other 

 means of effecting beauty in the higher sense no royal road to 



