Many a person of cultivated taste saw a time when he could say, almost with Sancho Panza, "blessings on the man who invented whitewash! It covers a tapestry, a carving, or a sculpture all over like a blanket;" like that one spoken of in Macbeth.

England is just beginning to learn what treasures of art in old mansions, churches and cathedrals were saved to the present age by a timely application of that cheap and healthy fluid.

For there was a time when stern men of iron will arose, who had no fear of Gothic architecture, French tapestry, or Italian sculpture before their eyes; who treated things that had awed or dazzled the world as "baubles" of vanity, to be put away, as King Josiah put away from his realm the graven images of his predecessors.

And these men thought they were doing good service to religion by pushing their bayonets at the most delicate works of the needle, pencil and chisel; ripping and slitting the most elaborately wrought tapestry,- -stabbing off the fine leaf, and vine-work from carved cornices and wainscoting, and mutilating the marble lace-work of the sculptor in the old cathedrals.

The only way to save these choice things was to make them suddenly take the white veil from the whitewasher's brush.
Thousands of them were thus preserved, and they are now being brought forth to the light again, after having been shut away from the eye of man for several centuries.
The school-house is still standing in Huntingdon, in good condition and busy occupation, in which Oliver Cromwell stormed the English alphabet and carried the first parallel of monosyllables at the point of the pen.