title-page, in the style of the thirteenth century, according to the blazon upon which Sir S. R. Meyrick did us the honour to give his valuable opinion. To the able hand of Mr. C. A. Hanlon we are indebted for the block-illustrations of Mona Mediæva; and we gladly seize upon this opportunity of expressing our best acknowledgments to George Petrie, Esq., for the liberal and friendly communication of some of the most valuable illustrations, by the same engraver, of his great work on the Early Architecture of Ireland.

Vos VALETE ET PLAUDITE!

THE EDITORS.

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

All communications, drawings, &c., should be sent, as early as possible each quarter, to the publisher, addressed to the Editors of the Archæologia Cambrensis ; and in all cases, when desired, the originals of such communications, drawings, &c. will be carefully preserved for their owners, who may receive them on application.

The Editors will be much obliged to those who honour them with their correspondence, if, in all matters of dates and references, they will pay particular attention to the correctness of the numbers, passages, &c. quoted. In drawings and sketches, accuracy of detail and measurement will be esteemed far beyond picturesque effect, which is of little or no value for archæological purposes; and in case of illustrations of camps, castles, churches, buildings, or any monuments, being communicated, it is particularly requested that, if possible, a ground plan, with the proper measurements, may accompany them. The scale upon which a drawing or plan is made, ought always to be specified.

Early information of any projected alteration, mutilation, or destruction of monuments of any kind, will be gladly received; and the Editors will do their best, by informing the antiquarian world and by communicating with the proper authorities, to prevent or remedy any damage threatened or done.

No. II. WILL BE PUBLISHED ON THE FIRST OF APRIL.

ON THE STUDY AND PRESERVATION OF

NATIONAL ANTIQUITIES.

ONE of the most honourable characteristics of the times in which we live is, that, concurrently with a spirit of invention and progress, there has arisen amongst us, and there flourishes, a deep and warm feeling of veneration for whatever was good and beautiful in former days, as well as a desire to examine into, and to study, the works of past ages. After many aberrations of taste, we seem to have arrived at the conviction that a thing is not to be considered suitable and good merely because it is new, but that our forefathers were able to produce works of skill and art no way inferior to our own, and often far superior to them. For a considerable period the civilized world appears to have thought that taste

that mysterious sense of the beautiful which all men have implanted in their bosoms, in a greater or smaller degree was always improving; and that the laws of fitness and of beauty could at any time be changed for the better. This idea, which can be traced in its action during the last three centuries at least, was fostered by the incontestable progress made in mechanical skill and scientific discovery throughout the same period. Men saw that knowledge was begetting knowledge; and they argued, not altogether wrongly, that taste could engender taste. Had they acted as logically in an æsthetical as they did in a practical point of view, they would have done well, and taste might indeed have advanced, instead of retrograding; but they set out on an erroneous principle that of despising all that was old merely on account of its age- and yet they committed the greater solecism of trying to base their standard of beauty on the effete and defunct systems of classical antiquity.

The revulsion of taste and opinion that occurred amongst most European nations in the sixteenth century, to whatever causes, primary or secondary, it may be ascribed, certainly tended to take men back along the road they had been travelling, rather than to advance them on it. Architecture declined immediately, and is still pining under the shock it then received; painting flourished awhile, then declined, and only of late has begun to revive; sculpture followed the

same fate; though both these tender arts, strange to say, suffered less than their more robust sister; music, too, felt the fatal influence, but, as being, probably, more intimately connected than the other fine arts with the psychological constitution of man, it began to revive sooner than the rest. The comparatively darkest age for the fine arts, of any since the tenth century, was the eighteenth: and when we look back at the condition in which these arts were one hundred years ago, especially in our own country, we feel perplexed to account satisfactorily for their rapid revival, and their promising condition, which we are allowed to witness at the present day.

Many causes, into which we have not the ability to penetrate, have conduced to this effect: a more wholesome condition of religious and political feeling-(for men are not quite satisfied with the result of their operations in Church and State during the last three hundred years; very few find themselves happier and better than their forefathers;) -a more extended acquaintance with the real history of the early and middle ages-(for every day proves to us more vividly that nine-tenths of our currently received histories ought to be re-written, would we have them consonant to truth;)—a return to a purer perception of the eternal harmony and beauty of the Almighty's works, caused by a more extended knowledge of them, and a more diligent searching after their marvellous developements;-these, and other circumstances of a related nature, have opened men's eyes, have made them wiser and humbler than they were, have shewn to them how far from truth and beauty their notions had been removed, and have led them to the careful study of national antiquities, as that first step in history which can alone lead to a knowledge of the hidden springs of national happiness.

Our fathers pulled down the churches and castles of their ancestors, because, forsooth, they were not sufficiently conformable to their own degenerate and distorted taste: - we, their sons, are now painfully rebuilding and restoring them. They condescended to judge a thing worthy of preservation if it savoured of Greek or Roman times, because their own system of æsthetics was founded on a puny and bastard imitation of Greek and Roman art; but for all that intervened between the fall of the Roman empire (when the arts of the

ancient world fell, like its religion and its ethics, never to rise again) and their own days, they professed the most supreme contempt, and could find no sympathy. We, on the contrary, can now perceive how much more magnificent is a feudal castle than a modern palace,- how superior, in all attributes of dignity and stateliness, is an ancient manor house to a modern villa,- how intrinsically better is one of the burgher houses of the fifteenth century to the tawdry shop or gin-palace of the nineteenth.

Fifty years ago it was supposed that typographical and pictorial skill had reached their ne plus ultra in the embellishment of literature; but we now find out that for taste and beauty we must recur to the illuminated MSS. of many centuries back. Our fathers adorned their sideboards with plate of meagre and unmeaning design, void of all traces of the least sentiment of art; but the goldsmiths of the present day search anxiously for the designs of their predecessors of the middle ages, or look for patterns even to the Arabian artificers of medieval Spain. In a word, we now look to antiquity for the rekindling of that flame which led our progenitors onward in a path of sure and sound progress; and by combining the knowledge we have thus recovered with the knowledge we derive from our indubitable advance in natural science, we seem to be doing much towards redeeming the errors of former days, and towards stopping that headlong torrent of selfishness and arrogance which has threatened, and perhaps still threatens, to destroy the good features of our national character.

What is it, we may ask, that attaches the affections of the human mind so strongly to things and localities? In the uncultivated breast it may be the sensual pleasures of the fleeting moment; but in the heart of the generous and cultivated man it is the thought of the great and good deeds, the joys and woes, of others, associated with particular objects and spots. The idea, however, of another's actions implies, almost necessarily, a recollection of the past; and he who can trace the welfare he now enjoys to the past kindness of others, he who honours his father and his mother, and can participate in their recollections of pleasure or of pain, will carry his thoughts still farther back, and will plunge into the dim mist which veils the face of antiquity. He who truly loves his country, and understands its history, must venerate

the records of that history, whether they be in parchment, in brass, in stone, or in plain turf. He who can associate any feeling of self-congratulation with the deeds of the great men of former days, will respect the things that they respected, and will not lightly regard what they loved. Such a man must be an antiquarian, or at least no rash contemner of antiquity: he will discriminate between what was good and what was bad in former times; but he will cherish and preserve whatever can illustrate the annals of past ages. A good member of the state, of kind and humble heart, be his intellectual powers brilliant, his faculties of invention and discovery intense, as they may, must not be a destroyer nor a despiser of his country's monuments. Whether public or private, all records of the past must have a certain value in his eyes; they are all part and parcel of the great national self; they are all indications of peculiar conditions of the general or the individual mind; every thing that is old has in it a certain intrinsic value, independent of its nature and purpose; the artist, the poet, the historian, the philosopher, should neglect none of these.

While the antiquities of our own country naturally hold the first place in our affections, and demand our first study as well as our most solicitous preservation, we should not forget that other nations have also each their peculiar remains, equally dear, equally valuable to them, as ours are to ourselves; and that, as members of the great human family, as brethren in the same noble cause of general civilization, we cannot be indifferent to the study and the preservation of antiquities wherever found. If we deprecate vandalism at home, we should discountenance it also abroad, and we should hold out the right hand of fellowship to all, who, in any nation whatsoever, are labouring in that surest method of instructing and improving their compatriots, the investigating, and the interpreting, national monuments. Add to which, that the antiquities of one country nearly always illustrate and explain those of another-at all events in portions of the globe inhabited by related divisions of our common race; and that, as the history of any single country cannot be well understood without some knowledge being acquired of that of neighbouring states, so the accomplished antiquary must not expect to make up his budget of knowledge, without collecting many of its stores from the treasury