Excerpt from The Christian Remembrancer, Vol. 52: Quarterly Review; July-October, 1866

Windsor can boast of three volumes; the Royal Library of Paris can boast of one volume, full of philosophical treatises; the collection at Holkham has the glory of possessing a ms. Treatise on hydraulics. His mss. - hard to read is his writing at the best, but it is rendered next to undecipherable by bei for some unexplained reason written from left to right - abouiig in revelations of physical truth, ' as Mr. Hallam 1 calls them, in which 'the discoveries which made Galileo, and Kepler, and Mmstin, and Maurolycus, and Castelli, and other names illus trious, the system of Cotpernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are anticipate so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature.' And the presence of the man was stamped with such beauty and nobility, as to give the world at once a full assurance how richly the inner nature was endowed. It was his happy position to gain immortality among men by his painting of the event which has given immortality to the Church. And now, as the Divine Face of the und ing One is dissolving away; while, under the soft handling 0 the elements, the apostolic com y is being gradually dislimned, it is well to be reminded of t ose other titles to fame which have hitherto remained unpublished. Such was Leonardo da Vinci. And it has been incumbent on us to say this much about him, because, by reckoning up his great endowments, we can compre hend the Titanic grandeur of his great and his triam hant rival. Christendom for three hundred years has been ldoing homage to Leonardo's Last Supper, ' and to The Last Judg ment of Michel Agniolo. The tasteless and unspiritual ex travagance of modern Romanism has heartlessly consigned both to ruin; but happily for the hopes of Christendom, the divine outlines of S. Peter's can neither be marred by the con tempt, nor vulgarised by the fanaticism of man: they fill the heart as they fill the eye, in their stainless purity, a warning anda witness to papal Rome and in them the inspired an unremunerated architect has 'ven expression to his sublime yearning for the reformation o the Church, while, at the same time, he has, as it were, brought to light the immaculate con cegt'ions of the soul of Dante.

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