193. But when I oppose these two words, Gothic and Greek, don't run away with the notion that I necessarily mean to oppose Christian and Greek. You must not confuse Gothic blood in a man's veins, with Christian feeling in a man's breast. There are unconverted and converted Goths; unconverted and converted Greeks. The Greek and Gothic temper is equally opposed, where the name of Christ has never been uttered by either, or when every other name is equally detested by both.

I want you to-day to examine with me that essential difference between Greek and Gothic temper, irrespective of creed, to which I have referred in my preface to the last edition of the "Stones of Venice," saying that the Byzantines gave law to Norman license. And I must therefore ask your patience while I clear your minds from some too prevalent errors as to the meaning of those two words, law and license.

194. There is perhaps no more curious proof of the disorder which impatient and impertinent science is introducing into classical thought and language, than the title chosen by the Duke of Argyll for his interesting study of Natural History—'The Reign of Law.' Law cannot reign. If a natural law, it admits no disobedience, and has nothing to put right. If a human one, it can compel no obedience, and has no power to prevent wrong. A king only can reign;—a person, that is to say, who, conscious of natural law, enforces human law so far as it is just.

195. Kinghood is equally necessary in Greek dynasty, and in Gothic. Theseus is every inch a king, as well as Edward III. But the laws which they have to enforce on their own and their companions' humanity are opposed to each other as much as their dispositions are.

The function of a Greek king was to enforce labour.

That of a Gothic king, to restrain rage.

The laws of Greece determine the wise methods of labour; and the laws of France determine the wise restraints of passion.

For the sins of Greece are in Indolence, and its pleasures; and the sins of France are in fury, and its pleasures.

196. You are now again surprised, probably, at hearing me oppose France typically to Greece. More strictly, I might oppose only a part of France,—Normandy. But it is better to say, France, [1] as embracing the seat of the established Norman power in the Island of our Lady; and the province in which it was crowned,—Champagne.

[Footnote 1: "Normandie, la franche." "France, la solue;" (chanson de Roland). One of my good pupils referred me to this ancient and glorious French song.]

France is everlastingly, by birth, name, and nature, the country of the Franks, or free persons; and the first source of European frankness, or franchise. The Latin for franchise is libertas. But the modern or Cockney-English word liberty,—Mr. John Stuart Mill's,—is not the equivalent of libertas; and the modern or Cockney-French word liberte,- -M. Victor Hugo's,—is not the equivalent of franchise.

197. The Latin for franchise, I have said, is libertas; the Greek is [Greek: *eleupheria*]. In the thoughts of all three nations, the idea is precisely the same, and the word used for the idea by each nation therefore accurately translates the word of the other: [Greek: *eleupheria*]—libertas—franchise—reciprocally translate each other. Leonidas is characteristically [Greek: *eleupheros*] among Greeks; Publicola, characteristically liber, among Romans; Edward III. and the Black Prince, characteristically frank among French. And that common idea, which the words express, as all the careful scholars among you will know, is, with all the three nations, mainly of deliverance from the slavery of passion. To be [Greek: *eleupheros*], liber, or franc, is first to have learned how to rule our own passions; and then, certain that our own conduct is right, to persist in that conduct against all resistance, whether of counter-opinion, counter pain, or counter-pleasure. To be defiant alike of the mob's thought, of the adversary's threat, and the harlot's temptation,—this is in the meaning of every great nation to be free; and the one condition upon which that freedom can be obtained is pronounced to you in a single verse of the 119th Psalm, "I will walk at liberty, for I seek Thy precepts."

198. Thy precepts:—Law, observe, being dominant over the Gothic as over the Greek king, but a quite different law. Edward III. feeling no anger against the Sieur de Ribaumont, and crowning him with his own pearl chaplet, is obeying the law of love, restraining anger; but Theseus, slaying the Minotaur, is obeying the law of justice, and enforcing anger.

The one is acting under the law of the charity, [Greek: *charis*] or grace of God; the other under the law of His judgment. The two together fulfil His [Greek: *krisis*] and [Greek: *agapae*].

199. Therefore the Greek dynasties are finally expressed in the kinghoods of Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus, who judge infallibly, and divide arithmetically. But the dynasty of the Gothic king is in equity and compassion, and his arithmetic is in largesse,

"Whose moste joy was, I wis, When that she gave, and said, Have this."

So that, to put it in shortest terms of all, Greek law is of Stasy, and Gothic of Ecstasy; there is no limit to the freedom of the Gothic hand or heart, and the children are most in the delight and the glory of liberty when they most seek their Father's precepts.

200. The two lines I have just quoted are, as you probably remember, from Chaucer's translation of the French Romance of the Rose, out of which I before quoted to you the description of the virtue of Debonnairete. Now that Debonnairete of the Painted Chamber of Westminster is the typical figure used by the French sculptors and painters for 'franchise,' frankness, or Frenchness; but in the Painted Chamber, Debonnairete, high breeding, 'out of goodnestedness,' or gentleness, is used, as an English king's English, of the Norman franchise. Here, then, is our own royalty,—let us call it Englishness, the grace of our proper kinghood;—and here is French royalty, the grace of French kinghood—Frenchness, rudely but sufficiently drawn by M. Didron from the porch of Chartres. She has the crown of fleur-de- lys, and William the Norman's shield.

201. Now this grace of high birth, the grace of his or her Most Gracious Majesty, has her name at Chartres written beside her, in Latin. Had it been in Greek, it would have been [Greek: *elevtheria*]. Being in Latin, what do you think it must be necessarily?—Of course, Libertas. Now M. Didron is quite the best writer on art that I know,— full of sense and intelligence; but of course, as a modern Frenchman,— one of a nation for whom the Latin and Gothic ideas of libertas have entirely vanished,—he is not on his guard against the trap here laid for him. He looks at the word libertas through his spectacles;—can't understand, being a thoroughly good antiquary, [1] how such a virtue, or privilege, could honestly be carved with approval in the twelfth century;—rubs his spectacles; rubs the inscription, to make sure of its every letter; stamps it, to make surer still;—and at last, though in a greatly bewildered state of mind, remains convinced that here is a sculpture of 'La Liberte' in the twelfth century. "C'est bien la liberte!" "On lit parfaitement libertas."

[Footnote 1: Historical antiquary; not art-antiquary I must limitedly say, however. He has made a grotesque mess of his account of the Ducal Palace of Venice, through his ignorance of the technical characters of sculpture.]

202. Not so, my good M. Didron!—a very different personage, this; of whom more, presently, though the letters of her name are indeed so plainly, 'Libertas, at non liberalitas,' liberalitas being the Latin for largesse, not for franchise.

This, then, is the opposition between the Greek and Gothic dynasties, in their passionate or vital nature; in the animal and inbred part of them;—Classic and romantic, Static and exstatic. But now, what opposition is there between their divine natures? Between Theseus and Edward III., as warriors, we now know the difference; but between Theseus and Edward III, as theologians; as dreaming and discerning creatures, as didactic kings,—engraving letters with the point of the sword, instead of thrusting men through with it,—changing the club into the ferula, and becoming schoolmasters as well as kings; what is, thus, the difference between them?

Theologians I called them. Philologians would be a better word,—lovers of the [Greek: *Logos*], or Word, by which the heavens and earth were made. What logos, about this Logos, have they learned, or can they teach?

203. I showed you, in my first lecture, the Byzantine Greek lion, as descended by true unblemished line from the Nemean Greek; but with this difference: Heracles kills the beast, and makes a helmet and cloak of his skin; the Greek St. Mark converts the beast, and makes an evangelist of him.

Is not that a greater difference, think you, than one of mere decadence?

This 'maniera goffa e sproporzionata' of Vasari is not, then, merely the wasting away of former leonine strength into thin rigidities of death? There is another change going on at the same time,—body perhaps subjecting itself to spirit.

I will not teaze you with farther questions. The facts are simple enough. Theseus and Heracles have their religion, sincere and sufficient,—a religion of lion-killers, minotaur-killers, very curious and rude; Eleusinian mystery mingled in it, inscrutable to us now,— partly always so, even to them.

204. Well; the Greek nation, in process of time, loses its manliness,— becomes Graeculus instead of Greek. But though effeminate and feeble, it inherits all the subtlety of its art, all the cunning of its mystery; and it is converted to a more spiritual religion. Nor is it altogether degraded, even by the diminution of its animal energy. Certain spiritual phenomena are possible to the weak, which are hidden from the strong;—nay, the monk may, in his order of being, possess strength denied to the warrior. Is it altogether, think you, by blundering, or by disproportion in intellect or in body, that Theseus becomes St. Athanase? For that is the kind of change which takes place, from the days of the great King of Athens, to those of the great Bishop of Alexandria, in the thought and theology, or, summarily, in the spirit of the Greek.

Now we have learned indeed the difference between the Gothic knight and the Greek knight; but what will be the difference between the Gothic saint and Greek saint?

Franchise of body against constancy of body.

Franchise of thought, then, against constancy of thought.

Edward III. against Theseus.

And the Frank of Assisi against St. Athanase.

205. Utter franchise, utter gentleness in theological thought. Instead of, 'This is the faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved,' 'This is the love, which if a bird or an insect keep faithfully, it shall be saved.'

Gentlemen, you have at present arrived at a phase of natural science in which, rejecting alike the theology of the Byzantine, and the affection of the Frank, you can only contemplate a bird as flying under the reign of law, and a cricket as singing under the compulsion of caloric.

I do not know whether you yet feel that the position of your boat on the river also depends entirely on the reign of law, or whether, as your churches and concert-rooms are privileged in the possession of organs blown by steam, you are learning yourselves to sing by gas, and expect the Dies Irae to the announced by a steam-trumpet. But I can very positively assure you that, in my poor domain of imitative art, not all the mechanical or gaseous forces of the world, nor all the laws of the universe, will enable you either to see a colour, or draw a line, without that singular force anciently called the soul, which it was the function of the Greek to discipline in the duty of the servants of God, and of the Goth to lead into the liberty of His children.

206. But in one respect I wish you were more conscious of the existence of law than you appear to be. The difference which I have pointed out to you as existing between these great nations, exists also between two orders of intelligence among men, of which the one is usually called Classic, the other Romantic. Without entering into any of the fine distinctions between these two sects, this broad one is to be observed as constant: that the writers and painters of the Classic school set down nothing but what is known to be true, and set it down in the perfectest manner possible in their way, and are thenceforward authorities from whom there is no appeal. Romantic writers and painters, on the contrary, express themselves under the impulse of passions which may indeed lead them to the discovery of new truths, or to the more delightful arrangement or presentment of things already known: but their work, however brilliant or lovely, remains imperfect, and without authority. It is not possible, of course, to separate these two orders of men trenchantly: a classic writer may sometimes, whatever his care, admit an error, and a romantic one may reach perfection through enthusiasm. But, practically, you may separate the two for your study and your education; and, during your youth, the business of us your masters is to enforce on you the reading, for school work, only of classical books: and to see that your minds are both informed of the indisputable facts they contain, and accustomed to act with the infallible accuracy of which they set the example.

207. I have not time to make the calculation, but I suppose that the daily literature by which we now are principally nourished, is so large in issue that though St. John's "even the world itself could not contain the books which should be written" may be still hyperbole, it is nevertheless literally true that the world might be wrapped in the books which are written; and that the sheets of paper covered with type on any given subject, interesting to the modern mind, (say the prospects of the Claimant,) issued in the form of English morning papers during a single year, would be enough literally to pack the world in.

208. Now I will read you fifty-two lines of a classical author, which, once well read and understood, contain more truth than has been told you all this year by this whole globe's compass of print.

Fifty-two lines, of which you will recognize some as hackneyed, and see little to admire in others. But it is not possible to put the statements they contain into better English, nor to invalidate one syllable of the statements they contain. [1]

[Footnote 1: 'The Deserted Village,' line 251 to 302.]

209. Even those, and there may be many here, who would dispute the truth of the passage, will admit its exquisite distinctness and construction. If it be untrue, that is merely because I have not been taught by my modern education to recognize a classical author; but whatever my mistakes, or yours, may be, there are certain truths long known to all rational men, and indisputable. You may add to them, but you cannot diminish them. And it is the business of a University to determine what books of this kind exist, and to enforce the understanding of them.

210. The classical and romantic arts which we have now under examination therefore consist,—the first, in that which represented, under whatever symbols, truths respecting the history of men, which it is proper that all should know; while the second owes its interest to passionate impulse or incident. This distinction holds in all ages, but the distinction between the franchise of Northern, and the constancy of Byzantine, art, depends partly on the unsystematic play of emotion in the one, and the appointed sequence of known fact or determined judgment in the other.

You will find in the beginning of M. Didron's book, already quoted, an admirable analysis of what may be called the classic sequence of Christian theology, as written in the sculpture of the Cathedral of Chartres. You will find in the treatment of the facade of Orvieto the beginning of the development of passionate romance,—the one being grave sermon writing; the other, cheerful romance or novel writing: so that the one requires you to think, the other only to feel or perceive; the one is always a parable with a meaning, the other only a story with an impression.

211. And here I get at a result concerning Greek art, which is very sweeping and wide indeed. That it is all parable, but Gothic, as distinct from it, literal. So absolutely does this hold, that it reaches down to our modern school of landscape. You know I have always told you Turner belonged to the Greek school. Precisely as the stream of blood coming from under the throne of judgment in the Byzantine mosaic of Torcello is a sign of condemnation, his scarlet clouds are used by Turner as a sign of death; and just as on an Egyptian tomb the genius of death lays the sun down behind the horizon, so in his Cephalus and Procris, the last rays of the sun withdraw from the forest as the nymph expires.

And yet, observe, both the classic and romantic teaching may be equally earnest, only different in manner. But from classic art, unless you understand it, you may get nothing; from romantic art, even if you don't understand it, you get at least delight.

212. I cannot show the difference more completely or fortunately than by comparing Sir Walter Scott's type of libertas, with the franchise of Chartres Cathedral, or Debonnairete of the Painted Chamber.

At Chartres, and Westminster, the high birth is shown by the crown; the strong bright life by the flowing hair; the fortitude by the conqueror's shield; and the truth by the bright openness of the face:

"She was not brown, nor dull of hue, But white as snowe, fallen newe."

All these are symbols, which, if you cannot read, the image is to you only an uninteresting stiff figure. But Sir Walter's Franchise, Diana Vernon, interests you at once in personal aspect and character. She is no symbol to you; but if you acquaint yourself with her perfectly, you find her utter frankness, governed by a superb self-command; her spotless truth, refined by tenderness; her fiery enthusiasm, subdued by dignity; and her fearless liberty, incapable of doing wrong, joining to fulfil to you, in sight and presence, what the Greek could only teach by signs.

213. I have before noticed—though I am not sure that you have yet believed my statement of it—the significance of Sir Walter's as of Shakspeare's names; Diana 'Vernon, semper viret,' gives you the conditions of purity and youthful strength or spring which imply the highest state of libertas. By corruption of the idea of purity, you get the modern heroines of London Journal—or perhaps we may more fitly call it 'Cockney-daily'—literature. You have one of them in perfection, for instance, in Mr. Charles Reade's 'Griffith Gaunt'— "Lithe, and vigorous, and one with her great white gelding;" and liable to be entirely changed in her mind about the destinies of her life by a quarter of an hour's conversation with a gentleman unexpectedly handsome; the hero also being a person who looks at people whom he dislikes, with eyes "like a dog's in the dark;" and both hero and heroine having souls and intellects also precisely corresponding to those of a dog's in the dark, which is indeed the essential picture of the practical English national mind at this moment,—happy if it remains doggish,—Circe not usually being content with changing people into dogs only. For the Diana Vernon of the Greek is Artemis Laphria, who is friendly to the dog; not to the swine. Do you see, by the way, how perfectly the image is carried out by Sir Walter in putting his Diana on the border country? "Yonder blue hill is in Scotland," she says to her cousin,—not in the least thinking less of him for having been concerned, it may be, in one of Bob Roy's forays. And so gradually you get the idea of Norman franchise carried out in the free-rider or free-booter; not safe from degradation on that side also; but by no means of swinish temper, or foraging, as at present the British speculative public, only with the snout.

214. Finally, in the most soft and domestic form of virtue, you have Wordsworth's ideal:

"Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin liberty."

The distinction between these northern types of feminine virtue, and the figures of Alcestis, Antigone, or Iphigenia, lies deep in the spirit of the art of either country, and is carried out into its most unimportant details. We shall find in the central art of Florence at once the thoughtfulness of Greece and the gladness of England, associated under images of monastic severity peculiar to herself.

And what Diana Vernon is to a French ballerine dancing the Cancan, the 'libertas' of Chartres and Westminster is to the 'liberty' of M. Victor Hugo and Mr. John Stuart Mill.



LECTURE IX.

THE TYRRHENE SEA.

215. We may now return to the points of necessary history, having our ideas fixed within accurate limits as to the meaning of the word Liberty; and as to the relation of the passions which separated the Guelph and Ghibelline to those of our own days.

The Lombard or Guelph league consisted, after the accession of Florence, essentially of the three great cities—Milan, Bologna, and Florence; the Imperial or Ghibelline league, of Verona, Pisa, and Siena. Venice and Genoa, both nominally Guelph, are in furious contention always for sea empire while Pisa and Genoa are in contention, not so much for empire, as honour. Whether the trade of the East was to go up the Adriatic, or round by the Gulf of Genoa, was essentially a mercantile question; but whether, of the two ports in sight of each other, Pisa or Genoa was to be the Queen of the Tyrrhene Sea, was no less distinctly a personal one than which of two rival beauties shall preside at a tournament.

216. This personal rivalry, so far as it was separated from their commercial interests, was indeed mortal, but not malignant. The quarrel was to be decided to the death, but decided with honour; and each city had four observers permittedly resident in the other, to give account of all that was done there in naval invention and armament.

217. Observe, also, in the year 1251, when we quitted our history, we left Florence not only Guelph, as against the Imperial power, (that is to say, the body of her knights who favoured the Pope and Italians, in dominion over those who favoured Manfred and the Germans), but we left her also definitely with her apron thrown over her shield; and the tradesmen and craftsmen in authority over the knight, whether German or Italian, Papal or Imperial.

That is in 1251. Now in these last two lectures I must try to mark the gist of the history of the next thirty years. The Thirty Years' War, this, of the middle ages, infinitely important to all ages; first observe, between Guelph and Ghibelline, ending in the humiliation of the Ghibelline; and, secondly, between Shield and Apron, or, if you like better, between Spear and Hammer, ending in the breaking of the Spear.

218. The first decision of battle, I say, is that between Guelph and Ghibelline, headed by two men of precisely oppposite characters, Charles of Anjou and Manfred of Suabia. That I may be able to define the opposition of their characters intelligibly, I must first ask your attention to some points of general scholarship. I said in my last lecture that, in this one, it would be needful for us to consider what piety was, if we happened not to know; or worse than that, it may be, not instinctively to feel. Such want of feeling is indeed not likely in you, being English-bred; yet as it is the modern cant to consider all such sentiment as useless, or even shameful, we shall be in several ways advantaged by some examination of its nature. Of all classical writers, Horace is the one with whom English gentlemen have on the average most sympathy; and I believe, therefore, we shall most simply and easily get at our point by examining the piety of Horace.

219. You are perhaps, for the moment, surprised, whatever might have been admitted of AEneas, to hear Horace spoken of as a pious person. But of course when your attention is turned to the matter you will recollect many lines in which the word 'pietas' occurs, of which you have only hitherto failed to allow the force because you supposed Horace did not mean what he said.

220. But Horace always and altogether means what he says. It is just because—whatever his faults may have been—he was not a hypocrite, that English gentlemen are so fond of him. "Here is a frank fellow, anyhow," they say, "and a witty one." Wise men know that he is also wise. True men know that he is also true. But pious men, for want of attention, do not always know that he is pious.

One great obstacle to your understanding of him is your having been forced to construct Latin verses, with introduction of the word 'Jupiter' always, at need, when you were at a loss for a dactyl. You always feel as if Horace only used it also when he wanted a dactyl.

221. Get quit of that notion wholly. All immortal writers speak out of their hearts. Horace spoke out of the abundance of his heart, and tells you precisely what he is, as frankly as Montaigne. Note then, first, how modest he is: "Ne parva Tyrrhenum per aequor, vela darem;—Operosa parvus, carmina fingo." Trust him in such words; he absolutely means them; knows thoroughly that he cannot sail the Tyrrhene Sea,—knows that he cannot float on the winds of Matinum,—can only murmur in the sunny hollows of it among the heath.

But note, secondly, his pride: "Exegi monumentum sere perennius." He is not the least afraid to say that. He did it; knew he had done it; said he had done it; and feared no charge of arrogance.

222. Note thirdly, then, his piety, and accept his assured speech of it: "Dis pietas mea, et Musa, cordi est." He is perfectly certain of that also; serenely tells you so; and you had better believe him. Well for you, if you can believe him; for to believe him, you must understand him first; and I can tell you, you won't arrive at that understanding by looking out the word 'pietas' in your White-and- Riddle. If you do you will find those tiresome contractions, Etym. Dub., stop your inquiry very briefly, as you go back; if you go forward, through the Italian pieta, you will arrive presently in another group of ideas, and end in misericordia, mercy, and pity. You must not depend on the form of the word; you must find out what it stands for in Horace's mind, and in Virgil's. More than race to the Roman; more than power to the statesman; yet helpless beside the grave,—"Non, Torquate, genus, non te facundia, non te, Restitvet pietas."

Nay, also what it stands for as an attribute, not only of men, but of gods; nor of those only as merciful, but also as avenging. Against AEneas himself, Dido invokes the waves of the Tyrrhene Sea, "si quid pia numina possunt." Be assured there is no getting at the matter by dictionary or context. To know what love means, you must love; to know what piety means, you must be pious.

223. Perhaps you dislike the word, now, from its vulgar use. You may have another if you choose, a metaphorical one,—close enough it seems to Christianity, and yet still absolutely distinct from it,—[Greek: *christos*]. Suppose, as you watch the white bloom of the olives of Val d'Arno and Val di Nievole, which modern piety and economy suppose were grown by God only to supply you with fine Lucca oil, you were to consider, instead, what answer you could make to the Socratio question, [Greek: *pothen un tis tovto to chrisma labot*]. [1]

[Footnote 1: Xem. Conviv., ii.]

224. I spoke to you first of Horace's modesty. All piety begins in modesty. You must feel that you are a very little creature, and that you had better do as you are bid. You will then begin to think what you are bid to do, and who bids it. And you will find, unless you are very unhappy indeed, that there is always a quite clear notion of right and wrong in your minds, which you can either obey or disobey, at your pleasure. Obey it simply and resolutely; it will become clearer to you every day: and in obedience to it, you will find a sense of being in harmony with nature, and at peace with God, and all His creatures. You will not understand how the peace comes, nor even in what it consists. It is the peace that passes understanding;—it is just as visionary and imaginative as love is, and just as real, and just as necessary to the life of man. It is the only source of true cheerfulness, and of true common sense; and whether you believe the Bible, or don't,—or believe the Koran, or don't—or believe the Vedas, or don't—it will enable you to believe in God, and please Him, and be such a part of the [Greek: *eudokia*] of the universe as your nature fits you to be, in His sight, faithful in awe to the powers that are above you, and gracious in regard to the creatures that are around.

225. I will take leave on this head to read one more piece of Carlyle, bearing much on present matters. "I hope also they will attack earnestly, and at length extinguish and eradicate, this idle habit of 'accounting for the moral sense,' as they phrase it. A most singular problem;—instead of bending every thought to have more, and ever more, of 'moral sense,' and therewith to irradiate your own poor soul, and all its work, into something of divineness, as the one thing needful to you in this world! A very futile problem that other, my friends; futile, idle, and far worse; leading to what moral ruin, you little dream of! The moral sense, thank God, is a thing you never will 'account for;' that, if you could think of it, is the perennial miracle of man; in all times, visibly connecting poor transitory man, here on this bewildered earth, with his Maker who is eternal in the heavens. By no greatest happiness principle, greatest nobleness principle, or any principle whatever, will you make that in the least clearer than it already is;—forbear, I say, or you may darken it away from you altogether! 'Two things,' says the memorable Kant, deepest and most logical of metaphysical thinkers, 'two things strike me dumb: the infinite starry heavens; and the sense of right and wrong in man.' Visible infinites, both; say nothing of them; don't try to 'account for them;' for you can say nothing wise."

226. Very briefly, I must touch one or two further relative conditions in this natural history of the soul. I have asked you to take the metaphorical, but distinct, word '[Greek: *chrisma*]' rather than the direct but obscure one 'piety'; mainly because the Master of your religion chose the metaphorical epithet for the perpetual one of His own life and person.

But if you will spend a thoughtful hour or two in reading the scripture, which pious Greeks read, not indeed on daintily printed paper, but on daintily painted clay,—if you will examine, that is to say, the scriptures of the Athenian religion, on their Pan-Athenaic vases, in their faithful days, you will find that the gift of the literal [Greek: *chrisma*], or anointing oil, to the victor in the kingly and visible contest of life, is signed always with the image of that spirit or goddess of the air who was the source of their invisible life. And let me, before quitting this part of my subject, give you one piece of what you will find useful counsel. If ever from the right apothecary, or [Greek: muropolaes]', you get any of that [Greek: *chrisma*],—don't be careful, when you set it by, of looking for dead dragons or dead dogs in it. But look out for the dead flies.

227. Again; remember, I only quote St. Paul as I quote Xenophon to you; but I expect you to get some good from both. As I want you to think what Xenophon means by '[Greek: *manteia*],' so I want you to consider also what St. Paul means by '[Greek: *prophetia*].' He tells you to prove all things,—to hold fast what is good, and not to despise 'prophesyings.'

228. Now it is quite literally probable, that this world, having now for some five hundred years absolutely refused to do as it is plainly bid by every prophet that ever spoke in any nation, and having reduced itself therefore to Saul's condition, when he was answered neither by Urim nor by prophets, may be now, while you sit there, receiving necromantic answers from the witch of Endor. But with that possibility you have no concern. There is a prophetic power in your own hearts, known to the Greeks, known to the Jews, known to the Apostles, and knowable by you. If it is now silent to you, do not despise it by tranquillity under that privation; if it speaks to you, do not despise it by disobedience.

229. Now in this broad definition of Pietas, as reverence to sentimental law, you will find I am supported by all classical authority and use of this word. For the particular meaning of which I am next about to use the word Religion, there is no such general authority, nor can there be, for any limited or accurate meaning of it. The best authors use the word in various senses; and you must interpret each writer by his own context. I have myself continually used the term vaguely. I shall endeavour, henceforward, to use it under limitations which, willing always to accept, I shall only transgress by carelessness, or compliance with some particular use of the word by others. The power in the word, then, which I wish you now to notice, is in its employment with respect to doctrinal divisions. You do not say that one man is of one piety, and another of another; but you do, that one man is of one religion, and another of another.

230. The religion of any man is thus properly to be interpreted, as the feeling which binds him, irrationally, to the fulfilment of duties, or acceptance of beliefs, peculiar to a certain company of which he forms a member, as distinct from the rest of the world. 'Which binds him irrationally,' I say;—by a feeling, at all events, apart from reason, and often superior to it; such as that which brings back the bee to its hive, and the bird to her nest.

A man's religion is the form of mental rest, or dwelling-place, which, partly, his fathers have gained or built for him, and partly, by due reverence to former custom, he has built for himself; consisting of whatever imperfect knowledge may have been granted, up to that time, in the land of his birth, of the Divine character, presence, and dealings; modified by the circumstances of surrounding life.

It may be, that sudden accession of new knowledge may compel him to cast his former idols to the moles and to the bats. But it must be some very miraculous interposition indeed which can justify him in quitting the religion of his forefathers; and, assuredly, it must be an unwise interposition which provokes him to insult it.

231. On the other hand, the value of religious ceremonial, and the virtue of religious truth, consist in the meek fulfilment of the one as the fond habit of a family; and the meek acceptance of the other, as the narrow knowledge of a child. And both are destroyed at once, and the ceremonial or doctrinal prejudice becomes only an occasion of sin, if they make us either wise in our own conceit, or violent in our methods of proselytism. Of those who will compass sea and land to make one proselyte, it is too generally true that they are themselves the children of hell, and make their proselytes twofold more so.

232. And now I am able to state to you, in terms so accurately defined that you cannot misunderstand them, that we are about to study the results in Italy of the victory of an impious Christian over a pious Infidel, in a contest which, if indeed principalities of evil spirit are ever permitted to rule over the darkness of this world, was assuredly by them wholly provoked, and by them finally decided. The war was not actually ended until the battle of Tagliacozzo, fought in August, 1268; but you need not recollect that irregular date, or remember it only as three years after the great battle of Welcome, Benevento; which was the decisive one. Recollect, therefore, securely:

1250. The First Trades Revolt in Florence. 1260. Battle of the Arbia. 1265. Battle of Welcome.

Then between the battle of Welcome and of Tagliacozzo, (which you might almost English in the real meaning of it as the battle of Hart's Death: 'cozzo' is a butt or thrust with the horn, and you may well think of the young Conradin as a wild hart or stag of the hills)—between those two battles, in 1266, comes the second and central revolt of the trades in Florence, of which I have to speak in next lecture.

233. The two German princes who perished in these two battles—Manfred of Tarentum, and his nephew and ward Conradin—are the natural son, and the legitimate grandson of Frederick II.: they are also the last assertors of the infidel German power in south Italy against the Church; and in alliance with the Saracens; such alliance having been maintained faithfully ever since Frederick II.'s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and cornation as its king. Not only a great number of Manfred's forts were commanded by Saracen governors, but he had them also appointed over civil tribunals. My own impression is that he found the Saracens more just and trustworthy than the Christians; but it is proper to remember the allegations of the Church against the whole Suabian family; namely, that Manfred had smothered his father Frederick under cushions at Ferentino; and that, of Frederick's sons, Conrad had poisoned Henry, and Manfred had poisoned Conrad. You will, however, I believe, find the Prince Manfred one of the purest representatives of northern chivalry. Against his nephew, educated in all knightly accomplishment by his mother, Elizabeth of Bavaria, nothing could be alleged by his enemies, even when resolved on his death, but the splendour of his spirit and the brightness of his youth.

234. Of the character of their enemy, Charles of Anjou, there will remain on your minds, after careful examination of his conduct, only the doubt whether I am justified in speaking of him as Christian against Infidel. But you will cease to doubt this when you have entirely entered into the conditions of this nascent Christianity of the thirteenth century. You will find that while men who desire to be virtuous receive it as the mother of virtues, men who desire to be criminal receive it as the forgiver of crimes; and that therefore, between Ghibelline or Infidel cruelty, and Guelph or Christian cruelty, there is always this difference,—that the Infidel cruelty is done in hot blood, and the Christian's in cold. I hope (in future lectures on the architecture of Pisa) to illustrate to you the opposition between the Ghibelline Conti, counts, and the Guelphic Visconti, viscounts or "against counts," which issues, for one thing, in that, by all men blamed as too deliberate, death of the Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. The Count Ugolino was a traitor, who entirely deserved death; but another Count of Pisa, entirely faithful to the Ghibelline cause, was put to death by Charles of Anjou, not only in cold blood, but with resolute infliction of Ugolino's utmost grief;—not in the dungeon, but in the full light of day—his son being first put to death before his eyes. And among the pieces of heraldry most significant in the middle ages, the asp on the shield of the Guelphic viscounts is to be much remembered by you as a sign of this merciless cruelty of mistaken religion; mistaken, but not in the least hypocritical. It has perfect confidence in itself, and can answer with serenity for all its deeds. The serenity of heart never appears in the guilty Infidels; they die in despair or gloom, greatly satisfactory to adverse religious minds.

235. The French Pope, then, Urban of Troyes, had sent for Charles of Anjou; who would not have answered his call, even with all the strength of Anjou and Provence, had not Scylla of the Tyrrhene Sea been on his side. Pisa, with eighty galleys (the Sicilian fleet added to her own), watched and defended the coasts of Rome. An irresistible storm drove her fleet to shelter; and Charles, in a single ship, reached the mouth of the Tiber, and found lodgings at Rome in the convent of St. Paul. His wife meanwhile spent her dowry in increasing his land army, and led it across the Alps. How he had got his wife, and her dowry, we must hear in Villani's words, as nearly as I can give their force in English, only, instead of the English word pilgrim, I shall use the Italian 'romeo' for the sake both of all English Juliets, and that you may better understand the close of the sixth canto of the Paradise.

236. "Now the Count Raymond Berenger had for his inheritance all Provence on this side Rhone; and he was a wise and courteous signor, and of noble state, and virtuous; and in his time they did honourable things; and to his court came by custom all the gentlemen of Provence, and France, and Catalonia, for his courtesy and noble state; and there they made many cobbled verses, and Provencal songs of great sentences."

237. I must stop to tell you that 'cobbled' or 'coupled' verses mean rhymes, as opposed to the dull method of Latin verse; for we have now got an ear for jingle, and know that dove rhymes to love. Also, "songs of great sentences" mean didactic songs, containing much in little, (like the new didactic Christian painting,) of which an example (though of a later time) will give you a better idea than any description.

"Vraye foy de necessite, Non tant seulement d'equite, Nous fait de Dieu sept choses croire: C'est sa doulce nativite, Son baptesme d'humilite, Et sa mort, digne de memoire: Son descens en la chartre noire, Et sa resurrection, voire; S'ascencion d'auctorite, La venue judicatoire, Ou ly bons seront mis en gloire, Et ly mals en adversite."

238. "And while they were making these cobbled verses and harmonious creeds, there came a romeo to court, returning from the shrine of St. James." I must stop again just to say that he ought to have been called a pellegrino, not a romeo, for the three kinds of wanderers are,— Palmer, one who goes to the Holy Land; Pilgrim, one who goes to Spain; and Romeo, one who goes to Rome. Probably this romeo had been to both. "He stopped at Count Raymond's court, and was so wise and worthy (valoroso), and so won the Count's grace, that he made him his master and guide in all things. Who also, maintaining himself in honest and religious customs of life, in a little time, by his industry and good sense, doubled the Count's revenues three times over, maintaining always a great and honoured court. Now the Count had four daughters, and no son; and by the sense and provision of the good romeo—(I can do no better than translate 'procaccio' provision, but it is only a makeshift for the word derived from procax, meaning the general talent of prudent impudence, in getting forward; 'forwardness,' has a good deal of the true sense, only diluted;)—well, by the sense and— progressive faculty, shall we say?—of the good pilgrim, he first married the eldest daughter, by means of money, to the good King Louis of France, saying to the Count, 'Let me alone,—Lascia-mi-fare—and never mind the expense, for if you marry the first one well, I'll marry you all the others cheaper, for her relationship."

239. "And so it fell out, sure enough; for incontinently the King of England (Henry III.) because he was the King of France's relation, took the next daughter, Eleanor, for very little money indeed; next, his natural brother, elect King of the Romans, took the third; and, the youngest still remaining unmarried,—says the good romeo, 'Now for this one, I will you to have a strong man for son-in-law, who shall be thy heir;'—and so he brought it to pass. For finding Charles, Count of Anjou, brother of the King Louis, he said to Raymond, "'Give her now to him, for his fate is to be the best man in the world,'—prophesying of him. And so it was done. And after all this it came to pass, by envy which ruins all good, that the barons of Provence became jealous of the good romeo, and accused him to the Count of having ill-guided his goods, and made Raymond demand account of them. Then the good romeo said, 'Count, I have served thee long, and have put thee from little state into mighty, and for this, by false counsel of thy people, thou art little grateful. I came into thy court a poor romeo; I have lived honestly on thy means; now, make to be given to me my little mule and my staff and my wallet, as I came, and I will make thee quit of all my service.' The Count would not he should go; but for nothing would he stay; and so he came, and so he departed, that no one ever knew whence he had come, nor whither he went. It was the thought of many that he was indeed a sacred spirit."

240. This pilgrim, you are to notice, is put by Dante in the orb of justice, as a just servant; the Emperor Justinian being the image of a just ruler. Justinian's law-making turned out well for England; but the good romeo's match-making ended ill for it; and for Borne, and Naples also. For Beatrice of Provence resolved to be a queen like her three sisters, and was the prompting spirit of Charles's expedition to Italy. She was crowned with him, Queen of Apulia and Sicily, on the day of the Epiphany, 1265; she and her husband bringing gifts that day of magical power enough; and Charles, as soon as the feast of coronation was over, set out to give battle to Manfred and his Saracens. "And this Charles," says Villani, "was wise, and of sane counsel; and of prowess in arms, and fierce, and much feared and redoubted by all the kings in the world;—magnanimous and of high purposes; fearless in the carrying forth of every great enterprise; firm in every adversity; a verifier of his every word; speaking little,—doing much; and scarcely ever laughed, and then but a little; sincere, and without flaw, as a religious and catholic person; stern in justice, and fierce in look; tall and nervous in person, olive coloured, and with a large nose, and well he appeared a royal majesty more than other men. Much he watched, and little he slept; and used to say that so much time as one slept, one lost; generous to his men-at-arms, but covetous to acquire land, signory, and coin, come how it would, to furnish his enterprises and wars: in courtiers, servants of pleasure, or jocular persons, he delighted never."

241. To this newly crowned and resolute king, riding south from Rome, Manfred, from his vale of Nocera under Mount St. Augelo, sends to offer conditions of peace. Jehu the son of Nimshi is not swifter of answer to Ahaziah's messenger than the fiery Christian king, in his 'What hast thou to do with peace?' Charles answers the messengers with his own lips: "Tell the Sultan of Nocera, this day I will put him in hell, or he shall put me in paradise."

242. Do not think it the speech of a hypocrite. Charles was as fully prepared for death that day as ever Scotch Covenanter fighting for his Holy League; and as sure that death would find him, if it found, only to glorify and bless. Balfour of Burley against Claverhouse is not more convinced in heart that he draws the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. But all the knightly pride of Claverhouse himself is knit together, in Charles, with fearless faith, and religious wrath. "This Saracen scum, led by a bastard German,—traitor to his creed, usurper among his race,—dares it look me, a Christian knight, a prince of the house of France, in the eyes? Tell the Sultan of Nocera, to-day I put him in hell, or he puts me in paradise."

They are not passionate words neither; any more than hypocritical ones. They are measured, resolute, and the fewest possible. He never wasted words, nor showed his mind, but when he meant it should be known.

243. The messenger returned, thus answered; and the French king rode on with his host. Manfred met him in the plain of Grandella, before Benevento. I have translated the name of the fortress 'Welcome.' It was altered, as you may remember, from Maleventum, for better omen; perhaps, originally, only [Greek: *maloeis*]—a rock full of wild goats?—associating it thus with the meaning of Tagliacozzo.

244. Charles divided his army into four companies. The captain of his own was our English Guy de Montfort, on whom rested the power and the fate of his grandfather, the pursuer of the Waldensian shepherds among the rocks of the wild goats. The last, and it is said the goodliest, troop was of the exiled Guelphs of Florence, under Guido Guerra, whose name you already know. "These," said Manfred, as he watched them ride into their ranks, "cannot lose to-day." He meant that if he himself was the victor, he would restore these exiles to their city. The event of the battle was decided by the treachery of the Count of Caserta, Manfred's brother-in-law. At the end of the day only a few knights remained with him, whom he led in the last charge. As he helmed himself, the crest fell from his helmet. "Hoc est signum Dei," he said,—so accepting what he saw to be the purpose of the Ruler of all things; not claiming God as his friend. not asking anything of Him, as if His purpose could be changed; not fearing Him as an enemy; but accepting simply His sign that the appointed day of death was come. He rode into the battle armed like a nameless soldier, and lay unknown among the dead.

245. And in him died all southern Italy. Never, after that day's treachery, did her nobles rise, or her people prosper.

Of the finding of the body of Manfred, and its casting forth, accursed, you may read, if you will, the story in Dante. I trace for you to-day rapidly only the acts of Charles after this victory, and its consummation, three years later, by the defeat of Conradin.

The town of Benevento had offered no resistance to Charles, but he gave it up to pillage, and massacred its inhabitants. The slaughter, indiscriminate, continued for eight days; the women and children were slain with the men, being of Saracen blood. Manfred's wife, Sybil of Epirus, his children, and all his barons, died, or were put to death, in the prisons of Provence. With the young Conrad, all the faithful Ghibel-line knights of Pisa were put to death. The son of Frederick of Antioch, who drove the Guelphs from Florence, had his eyes torn out, and was hanged, he being the last child of the house of Suabia. Twenty- four of the barons of Calabria were executed at Gallipoli, and at Home. Charles cut off the feet of those who had fought for Conrad; then— fearful lest they should be pitied—shut them into a house of wood, and burned them. His lieutenant in Sicily, William of the Standard, besieged the town of Augusta, which defended itself with some fortitude, but was betrayed, and all its inhabitants, (who must have been more than three thousand, for there were a thousand able to bear arms,) massacred in cold blood; the last of them searched for in their hiding-places, when the streets were empty, dragged to the sea-shore, then beheaded, and their bodies thrown into the sea. Throughout Calabria the Christian judges of Charles thus forgave his enemies. And the Mohammedan power and heresy ended in Italy, and she became secure in her Catholic creed.

246. Not altogether secure under French dominion. After fourteen years of misery, Sicily sang her angry vespers, and a Calabrian admiral burnt the fleet of Charles before his eyes, where Scylla rules her barking Salamis. But the French king died in prayerful peace, receiving the sacrament with these words of perfectly honest faith, as he reviewed his past life: "Lord God, as I truly believe that you are my Saviour, so I pray you to have mercy on my soul; and as I truly made the conquest of Sicily more to serve the Holy Church than for my own covetousness, so I pray you to pardon my sins."

247. You are to note the two clauses of this prayer. He prays absolute mercy, on account of his faith in Christ; but remission of purgatory, in proportion to the quantity of good work he has done, or meant to do, as against evil. You are so much wiser in these days, you think, not believing in purgatory; and so much more benevolent,—not massacring women and children. But we must not be too proud of not believing in purgatory, unless we are quite sure of our real desire to be purified: and as to our not massacring children, it is true that an English gentleman will not now himself willingly put a knife into the throat either of a child or a lamb; but he will kill any quantity of children by disease in order to increase his rents, as unconcernedly as he will eat any quantity of mutton. And as to absolute massacre, I do not suppose a child feels so much pain in being killed as a full-grown man, and its life is of less value to it. No pain either of body or thought through which you could put an infant, would be comparable to that of a good son, or a faithful lover, dying slowly of a painful wound at a distance from a family dependent upon him, or a mistress devoted to him. But the victories of Charles, and the massacres, taken in sum, would not give a muster-roll of more than twenty thousand dead; men, women, and children counted all together. On the plains of France, since I first began to speak to you on the subject of the arts of peace, at least five hundred thousand men, in the prime of life, have been massacred by the folly of one Christian emperor, the insolence of another, and the mingling of mean rapacity with meaner vanity, which Christian nations now call 'patriotism.'

248. But that the Crusaders, (whether led by St. Louis or by his brother,) who habitually lived by robbery, and might be swiftly enraged to murder, were still too savage to conceive the spirit or the character of this Christ whose cross they wear, I have again and again alleged to you; not, I imagine, without question from many who have been accustomed to look to these earlier ages as authoritative in doctrine, if not in example. We alike err in supposing them more spiritual or more dark, than our own. They had not yet attained to the knowledge which we have despised, nor dispersed from their faith the shadows with which we have again overclouded ours.

Their passions, tumultuous and merciless as the Tyrrhene Sea, raged indeed with the danger, but also with the uses, of naturally appointed storm; while ours, pacific in corruption, languish in vague maremma of misguided pools; and are pestilential most surely as they retire.



LECTURE X.

FLEUR DE LYS.

249. Through all the tempestuous winter which during the period of history we have been reviewing, weakened, in their war with the opposed rocks of religious or knightly pride, the waves of the Tuscan Sea, there has been slow increase of the Favonian power which is to bring fruitfulness to the rock, peace to the wave. The new element which is introduced in the thirteenth century, and perfects for a little time the work of Christianity, at least in some few chosen souls, is the law of Order and Charity, of intellectual and moral virtue, which it now became the function of every great artist to teach, and of every true citizen to maintain.

250. I have placed on your table one of the earliest existing engravings by a Florentine hand, representing the conception which the national mind formed of this spirit of order and tranquillity, "Cosmico," or the Equity of Kosmos, not by senseless attraction, but by spiritual thought and law. He stands pointing with his left hand to the earth, set only with tufts of grass; in his right hand he holds the ordered system of the universe—heaven and earth in one orb;—the heaven made cosmic by the courses of its stars; the earth cosmic by



the seats of authority and fellowship,—castles on the hills and cities in the plain.

251. The tufts of grass under the feet of this figure will appear to you, at first, grotesquely formal. But they are only the simplest expression, in such herbage, of the subjection of all vegetative force to this law of order, equity, or symmetry, which, made by the Greek the principal method of his current vegetative sculpture, subdues it, in the hand of Cora or Triptolemus, into the merely triple sceptre, or animates it, in Florence, to the likeness of the Fleur-de-lys.

252. I have already stated to you that if any definite flower is meant by these triple groups of leaves, which take their authoritatively typical form in the crowns of the Cretan and Laciuian Hera, it is not the violet, but the purple iris; or sometimes, as in Pindar's description of the birth of Ismus, the yellow water-flag, which you know so well in spring, by the banks of your Oxford streams. [1] But, in general, it means simply the springing of beautiful and orderly vegetation in fields upon which the dew falls pure. It is the expression, therefore, of peace on the redeemed and cultivated earth, and of the pleasure of heaven in the uncareful happiness of men clothed without labour, and fed without fear.

[Footnote 1: In the catalogues of the collection of drawings in this room, and in my "Queen of the Air" you will find all that I would ask you to notice about the various names and kinds of the flower, and their symbolic use.—Note only, with respect to our present purpose, that while the true white lily is placed in the hands of the Angel of the Annunciation even by Florentine artists, in their general design, the fleur-de-lys is given to him by Giovaiini Pisano on the facade of Orvieto; and that the flower in the crown-circlets of European kings answers, as I stated to you in my lecture on the Corona, to the Narcissus fillet of early Greece; the crown of abundance and rejoicing.]

253. In the passage, so often read by us, which announces the advent of Christianity as the dawn of peace on earth, we habitually neglect great part of the promise, owing to the false translation of the second clause of the sentence. I cannot understand how it should be still needful to point out to you here in Oxford that neither the Greek words [Greek: *"en anthriopois evdokia,"*] nor those of the vulgate, "in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis," in the slightest degree justify our English words, "goodwill to men."

Of God's goodwill to men, and to all creatures, for ever, there needed no proclamation by angels. But that men should be able to please Him,—that their wills should be made holy, and they should not only possess peace in themselves, but be able to give joy to their God, in the sense in which He afterwards is pleased with His own baptized Son;- -this was a new thing for Angels to declare, and for shepherds to believe.

254. And the error was made yet more fatal by its repetition in a passage of parallel importance,—the thanksgiving, namely, offered by Christ, that His Father, while He had hidden what it was best to know, not from the wise and prudent, but from some among the wise and prudent, and had revealed it unto babes; not 'for so it seemed good' in His sight, but 'that there might be well pleasing in His sight,'— namely, that the wise and simple might equally live in the necessary knowledge, and enjoyed presence, of God. And if, having accurately read these vital passages, you then as carefully consider the tenour of the two songs of human joy in the birth of Christ, the Magnificat, and the Nunc dimittis, you will find the theme of both to be, not the newness of blessing, but the equity which disappoints the cruelty and humbles the strength of men; which scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts; which fills the hungry with good things; and is not only the glory of Israel, but the light of the Gentiles.

255. As I have been writing these paragraphs, I have been checking myself almost at every word,—wondering, Will they be restless on their seats at this, and thinking all the while that they did not come here to be lectured on Divinity? You may have been a little impatient,—how could it well be otherwise? Had I been explaining points of anatomy, and showing you how you bent your necks and straightened your legs, you would have thought me quite in my proper function; because then, when you went with a party of connoisseurs through the Vatican, you could point out to them the insertion of the clavicle in the Apollo Belvidere; and in the Sistine Chapel the perfectly accurate delineation of the tibia in the legs of Christ. Doubtless; but you know I am lecturing at present on the goffi, and not on Michael Angelo; and the goffi are very careless about clavicles and shin-bones; so that if, after being lectured on anatomy, you went into the Campo Santo of Pisa, you would simply find nothing to look at, except three tolerably well- drawn skeletons. But if after being lectured on theology, you go into the Campo Santo of Pisa, you will find not a little to look at, and to remember.

256. For a single instance, you know Michael Angelo is admitted to have been so far indebted to these goffi as to borrow from the one to whose study of mortality I have just referred, Orcagna, the gesture of his Christ in the Judgment, He borrowed, however, accurately speaking, the position only, not the gesture; nor the meaning of it. [1] You all remember the action of Michael Angelo's Christ,—the right hand raised as if in violence of reprobation; and the left closed across His breast, as refusing all mercy. The action is one which appeals to persons of very ordinary sensations, and is very naturally adopted by the Renaissance painter, both for its popular effect, and its capabilities for the exhibition of his surgical science. But the old painter-theologian, though indeed he showed the right hand of Christ lifted, and the left hand laid across His breast, had another meaning in the actions. The fingers of the left hand are folded, in both the figures; but in Michael Angelo's as if putting aside an appeal; in Orcagna's, the fingers are bent to draw back the drapery from the right side. The right hand is raised by Michael Angelo as in anger; by Orcagna, only to show the wounded palm. And as, to the believing disciples, He showed them His hands and His side, so that they were glad,—so, to the unbelievers, at their judgment, He shows the wounds in hand and side. They shall look on Him whom they pierced.

[Footnote: I found all this in M. Didron's Iconographie, above quoted; I had never noticed the difference between the two figures myself.]

257. And thus, as we follow our proposed examination of the arts of the Christian centuries, our understanding of their work will be absolutely limited by the degree of our sympathy with the religion which our fathers have bequeathed to us. You cannot interpret classic marbles without knowing and loving your Pindar and AEschylus, neither can you interpret Christian pictures without knowing and loving your Isaiah and Matthew. And I shall have continually to examine texts of the one as I would verses of the other; nor must you retract yourselves from the labour in suspicion that I desire to betray your scepticism, or undermine your positivism, because I recommend to you the accurate study of books which have hitherto been the light of the world.

258. The change, then, in the minds of their readers at this date, which rendered it possible for them to comprehend the full purport of Christianity, was in the rise of the new desire for equity and rest, amidst what had hitherto been mere lust for spoil, and joy in battle. The necessity for justice was felt in the now extending commerce; the desire of rest in the now pleasant and fitly furnished habitation; and the energy which formerly could only be satisfied in strife, now found enough both of provocation and antagonism in the invention of art, and the forces of nature. I have in this course of lectures endeavoured to fasten your attention on the Florentine Revolution of 1250, because its date is so easily memorable, and it involves the principles of every subsequent one, so as to lay at once the foundations of whatever greatness Florence afterwards achieved by her mercantile and civic power. But I must not close even this slight sketch of the central history of Val d'Aruo without requesting you, as you find time, to associate in your minds, with this first revolution, the effects of two which followed it, being indeed necessary parts of it, in the latter half of the century.

259. Remember then that the first, in 1250, is embryonic; and the significance of it is simply the establishment of order, and justice against violence and iniquity. It is equally against the power of knights and priests, so far as either are unjust,—not otherwise.

When Manfred fell at Benevento, his lieutenant, the Count Guido Novello, was in command of Florence. He was just, but weak; and endeavoured to temporize with the Guelphs. His effort ought to be notable to you, because it was one of the wisest and most far-sighted ever made in Italy; but it failed for want of resolution, as the gentlest and best men are too apt to fail. He brought from Bologna two knights of the order—then recently established—of joyful brethren; afterwards too fatally corrupted, but at this time pure in purpose. They constituted an order of chivalry which was to maintain peace, obey the Church, and succour widows and orphans; but to be bound by no monastic vows. Of these two knights, he chose one Guelph, the other Ghibelline; and under their balanced power Gruido hoped to rank the forces of the civil, manufacturing, and trading classes, divided into twelve corporations of higher and lower arts. [1] But the moment this beautiful arrangement was made, all parties—Guelph, Ghibelline, and popular,—turned unanimously against Count Guido Novello. The benevolent but irresolute captain indeed gathered his men into the square of the Trinity; but the people barricaded the streets issuing from it; and Guido, heartless, and unwilling for civil warfare, left the city with his Germans in good order. And so ended the incursion of the infidel Tedeschi for this time. The Florentines then dismissed the merry brothers whom the Tedeschi had set over them, and besought help from Orvieto and Charles of Anjou; who sent them Guy de Montfort and eight hundred French riders; the blessing of whose presence thus, at their own request, was granted them on Easter Day, 1267.

[Footnote: The seven higher arts were, Lawyers, Physicians, Bankers, Merchants of Foreign Goods, Wool Manufacturers, Silk Manufacturers, Furriers. The five lower arts were, Retail Sellers of Cloth, Butchers, Shoemakers, Masons and Carpenters, Smiths.]

On Candlemas, if you recollect, 1251, they open their gates to the Germans; and on Easter, 1267, to the French.

260. Remember, then, this revolution, as coming between the battles of Welcome and Tagliacozzo; and that it expresses the lower revolutionary temper of the trades, with English and French assistance. Its immediate result was the appointment of five hundred and sixty lawyers, woolcombers, and butchers, to deliberate upon all State questions,— under which happy ordinances you will do well, in your own reading, to leave Florence, that you may watch, for a while, darling little Pisa, all on fire for the young Conradin. She sent ten vessels across the Gulf of Genoa to fetch him; received his cavalry in her plain of Sarzana; and putting five thousand of her own best sailors into thirty ships, sent them to do what they could, all down the coast of Italy. Down they went; startling Gaeta with an attack as they passed; found Charles of Anjou's French and Sicilian fleet at Messina, fought it, beat it, and burned twenty-seven of its ships.

261. Meantime, the Florentines prospered as they might with their religious-democratic constitution,—until the death, in the odour of sanctity, of Charles of Anjou, and of that Pope Martin IV. whose tomb was destroyed with Urban's at Perugia. Martin died, as you may remember, of eating Bolsena eels,—that being his share in the miracles of the lake; and you will do well to remember at the same time, that the price of the lake eels was three soldi a pound; and that Niccola of Pisa worked at Siena for six soldi a day, and his son Giovanni for four.

262. And as I must in this place bid farewell, for a time, to Niccola and to his son, let me remind you of the large commission which the former received on the occasion of the battle of Tagliacozzo, and its subsequent massacres, when the victor, Charles, having to his own satisfaction exterminated the seed of infidelity, resolves, both in thanksgiving, and for the sake of the souls of the slain knights for whom some hope might yet be religiously entertained, to found an abbey on the battle-field. In which purpose he sent for Niccola to Naples, and made him build on the field of Tagliacozzo, a church and abbey of the richest; and caused to be buried therein the infinite number of the bodies of those who died in that battle day; ordering farther, that, by many monks, prayer should be made for their souls, night and day. In which fabric the king was so pleased with Niccola's work that he rewarded and honoured him highly.

263. Do you not begin to wonder a little more what manner of man this Nicholas was, who so obediently throws down the towers which offend the Ghibelliues, and so skilfully puts up the pinnacles which please the Guelphs? A passive power, seemingly, he;—plastic in the hands of any one who will employ him to build, or to throw down. On what exists of evidence, demonstrably in these years here is the strongest brain of Italy, thus for six shilling a day doing what it is bid.

264. I take farewell of him then, for a little time, ratifying to you, as far as my knowledge permits, the words of my first master in Italian art, Lord Lindsay.

"In comparing the advent of Niccola Pisano to that of the sun at his rising, I am conscious of no exaggeration; on the contrary, it is the only simile by which I can hope to give you an adequate impression of his brilliancy and power relatively to the age in which he flourished. Those sons of Erebus, the American Indians, fresh from their traditional subterranean world, and gazing for the first time on the gradual dawning of the day in the East, could not have been more dazzled, more astounded, when the sun actually appeared, than the popes and podestas, friars and freemasons must have been in the thirteenth century, when from among the Biduinos, Bonannos, and Antealmis of the twelfth, Niccola emerged in his glory, sovereign and supreme, a fount of light, diffusing warmth and radiance over Christendom. It might be too much to parallel him in actual genius with Dante and Shakspeare; they stand alone and unapproachable, each on his distinct pinnacle of the temple of Christian song; and yet neither of them can boast such extent and durability of influence, for whatever of highest excellence has been achieved in sculpture and painting, not in Italy only, but throughout Europe, has been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, and in following up the principle which he first struck out.

"His latter days were spent in repose at Pisa, but the precise year of his death is uncertain; Vasari fixes it in 1275; it could not have been much later. He was buried in the Campo Santo. Of his personal character we, alas! know nothing; even Shakspeare is less a stranger to us. But that it was noble, simple, and consistent, and free from the petty foibles that too frequently beset genius, may be fairly presumed from the works he has left behind him, and from the eloquent silence of tradition."

265. Of the circumstances of Niccola Pisano's death, or the ceremonials practised at it, we are thus left in ignorance.

The more exemplary death of Charles of Aujou took place on the 7th of January, then, 1285; leaving the throne of Naples to a boy of twelve; and that of Sicily, to a Prince of Spain. Various discord, between French, Spanish, and Calabrese vices, thenceforward paralyzes South Italy, and Florence becomes the leading power of the Guelph faction. She had been inflamed and pacified through continual paroxysms of civil quarrel during the decline of Charles's power; but, throughout, the influence of the nobles declines, by reason of their own folly and insolence; while the people, though with no small degree of folly and insolence on their own side, keep hold of their main idea of justice. In the meantime, similar assertions of law against violence, and the nobility of useful occupation, as compared with that of idle rapine, take place in Bologna, Siena, and even at Rome, where Bologna sends her senator, Branca Leone, (short for Branca-di-Leone, Lion's Grip,) whose inflexible and rightly guarded reign of terror to all evil and thievish persons, noble or other, is one of the few passages of history during the middle ages, in which the real power of civic virtue may be seen exercised without warping by party spirit, or weakness of vanity or fear.

266. And at last, led by a noble, Giano della Bella, the people of Florence write and establish their final condemnation of noblesse living by rapine, those 'Ordinamenti della Giustizia,' which practically excluded all idle persons from government, and determined that the priors, or leaders of the State, should be priors, or leaders of its arts and productive labour; that its head 'podesta' or 'power' should be the standard-bearer of justice; and its council or parliament composed of charitable men, or good men: "boni viri," in the sense from which the French formed their noun 'bonte.'

The entire governing body was thus composed, first, of the Podestas, standard-bearer of justice; then of his military captain; then of his lictor, or executor; then of the twelve priors of arts and liberties— properly, deliberators on the daily occupations, interests, and pleasures of the body politic;—and, finally, of the parliament of "kind men," whose business was to determine what kindness could be shown to other states, by way of foreign policy.

267. So perfect a type of national government has only once been reached in the history of the human race. And in spite of the seeds of evil in its own impatience, and in the gradually increasing worldliness of the mercantile body; in spite of the hostility of the angry soldier, and the malignity of the sensual priest, this government gave to Europe the entire cycle of Christian art, properly so called, and every highest Master of labour, architectural, scriptural, or pictorial, practised in true understanding of the faith of Christ;—Orcagna, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Lionardo, Luini as his pupil, Lippi, Luca, Angelico, Botticelli, and Michael Angelo.

268. I have named two men, in this group, whose names are more familiar to your ears than any others, Angelico and Michael Angelo;—who yet are absent from my list of those whose works I wish you to study, being both extravagant in their enthusiasm,—the one for the nobleness of the spirit, and the other for that of the flesh. I name them now, because the gifts each had were exclusively Florentine; in whatever they have become to the mind of Europe since, they are utterly children of the Val d'Arno.

269. You are accustomed, too carelessly, to think of Angelico as a child of the Church, rather than of Florence. He was born in l387,— just eleven years, that is to say, after the revolt of Florence against the Church, and ten after the endeavour of the Church to recover her power by the massacres of Faenza and Cesena. A French and English army of pillaging riders were on the other side of the Alps,— six thousand strong; the Pope sent for it; Robert Cardinal of Geneva brought it into Italy. The Florentines fortified their Apennines against it; but it took winter quarters at Cesena, where the Cardinal of Geneva massacred five thousand persons in a day, and the children and sucklings were literally dashed against the stones.

270. That was the school which the Christian Church had prepared for their brother Angelica. But Fesole, secluding him in the shade of her mount of Olives, and Florence revealing to him the true voice of his Master, in the temple of St. Mary of the Flower, taught him his lesson of peace on earth, and permitted him his visions of rapture in heaven. And when the massacre of Cesena was found to have been in vain, and the Church was compelled to treat with the revolted cities who had united to mourn for her victories, Florence sent her a living saint, Catherine of Siena, for her political Ambassador.

271. Of Michael Angelo I need not tell you: of the others, we will read the lives, and think over them one by one; the great fact which I have written this course of lectures to enforce upon your minds is the dependence of all the arts on the virtue of the State, and its kindly order.

The absolute mind and state of Florence, for the seventy years of her glory, from 1280 to 1350, you find quite simply and literally described in the ll2th Psalm, of which I read you the descriptive verses, in the words in which they sang it, from this typically perfect manuscript of the time:—

Gloria et divitie in domo ejus, justitia ejus manet in seculum seculi. Exortum est in tenebris lumen reotis, misericors, et miserator, et Justus. Jocundus homo, qui miseretur, et commodat: disponet sermones suos in judicio. Dispersit, dedit pauperibus; justitia ejus manet in seculum seculi; cornu ejus exaltabitur in gloria.

I translate simply, praying you to note as the true one, the literal meaning of every word:—

Glory and riches are in his house. His justice remains for ever. Light is risen in darkness for the straightforward people. He is merciful in heart, merciful in deed, and just. A jocund man; who is merciful, and lends. He will dispose his words in judgment. He hath dispersed. He hath given to the poor. His justice remain! for ever. His horn shall be exalted in glory.

272. With vacillating, but steadily prevailing effort, the Florentines maintained this life and character for full half a century.

You will please now look at my staff of the year 1300, [Footnote: Page 33 in my second lecture on Engraving.] adding the names of Dante and Orcagna, having each their separate masterful or prophetic function.

That is Florence's contribution to the intellectual work of the world during these years of justice. Now, the promise of Christianity is given with lesson from the fleur-de-lys: Seek ye first the royalty of God, and His justice, "and all these things," material wealth, "shall be added unto you." It is a perfectly clear, perfectly literal,—never failing and never unfulfilled promise. There is no instance in the whole cycle of history of its not being accomplished,—fulfilled to the uttermost, with full measure, pressed down, and running over.

273. Now hear what Florence was, and what wealth she had got by her justice. In the year 1330, before she fell, she had within her walls a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, of whom all the men—(laity)— between the ages of fifteen and seventy, were ready at an instant to go out to war, under their banners, in number twenty-four thousand. The army of her entire territory was eighty thousand; and within it she counted fifteen hundred noble, families, every one absolutely submissive to her gonfalier of justice. She had within her walls a hundred and ten churches, seven priories, and thirty hospitals for the sick and poor; of foreign guests, on the average, fifteen hundred, constantly. From eight to ten thousand children were taught to read in her schools. The town was surrounded by some fifty square miles of uninterrupted garden, of olive, corn, vine, lily, and rose.

And the monetary existence of England and France depended upon her wealth. Two of her bankers alone had lent Edward III. of England five millions of money (in sterling value of this present hour).

274. On the 10th of March, 1337, she was first accused, with truth, of selfish breach of treaties. On the l0th of April, all her merchants in France were imprisoned by Philip Valois; and presently afterwards Edward of England failed, quite in your modern style, for his five millions. These money losses would have been nothing to her; but on the 7th of August, the captain of her army, Pietro de' Rossi of Parma, the unquestioned best knight in Italy, received a chance spear-stroke before Monselice, and died next day. He was the Bayard of Italy; and greater than Bayard, because living in a nobler time. He never had failed in any military enterprise, nor ever stained success with cruelty or shame. Even the German troops under him loved him without bounds. To his companions he gave gifts with such largesse, that his horse and armour were all that at any time he called his own. Beautiful and pure as Sir Galahad, all that was brightest in womanhood watched and honoured him.

And thus, 8th August, 1337, he went to his own place.—To-day I trace the fall of Florence no more.

I will review the points I wish you to remember; and briefly meet, so far as I can, the questions which I think should occur to you.

275. I have named Edward III. as our heroic type of Franchise. And yet I have but a minute ago spoken of him as 'failing' in quite your modern manner. I must correct my expression:—he had no intent of failing when he borrowed; and did not spend his money on himself. Nevertheless, I gave him as an example of frankness; but by no means of honesty. He is simply the boldest and royalest of Free Riders; the campaign of Crecy is, throughout, a mere pillaging foray. And the first point I wish you to notice is the difference in the pecuniary results of living by robbery, like Edward III., or by agriculture and just commerce, like the town of Florence. That Florence can lend five millions to the King of England, and loose them with little care, is the result of her olive gardens and her honesty. Now hear the financial phenomena attending military exploits, and a life of pillage.

276. I give you them in this precise year, 1338, in which the King of England failed to the Florentines.

"He obtained from the prelates, barons, and knights of the



shires, one half of their wool for this year—a very valuable and extraordinary grant. He seized all the tin "(above-ground, you mean Mr. Henry!)" in Cornwall and Devonshire, took possession of the lands of all priories alien, and of the money, jewels, and valuable effects of the Lombard merchants. He demanded certain quantities of bread, corn, oats, and bacon, from each county; borrowed their silver plate from many abbeys, as well as great sums of money both abroad and at home; and pawned his crown for fifty thousand florins." [1]

[Footnote 1: Henry's "History of England," book iv., chap. i.]

He pawns his queen's jewels next year; and finally summons all the gentlemen of England who had forty pounds a year, to come and receive the honour of knighthood, or pay to be excused!

277. II. The failures of Edward, or of twenty Edwards, would have done Florence no harm, had she remained true to herself, and to her neighbouring states. Her merchants only fall by their own increasing avarice; and above all by the mercantile form of pillage, usury. The idea that money could beget money, though more absurd than alchemy, had yet an apparently practical and irresistibly tempting confirmation in the wealth of villains, and the success of fools. Alchemy, in its day, led to pure chemistry; and calmly yielded to the science it had fostered. But all wholesome indignation against usurers was prevented, in the Christian mind, by wicked and cruel religious hatred of the race of Christ. In the end, Shakspeare himself, in his fierce effort against the madness, suffered himself to miss his mark by making his usurer a Jew: the Franciscan institution of the Mount of Pity failed before the lust of Lombardy, and the logic of Augsburg; and, to this day, the worship of the Immaculate Virginity of Money, mother of the Omnipotence of Money, is the Protestant form of Madonna worship.

278. III. The usurer's fang, and the debtor's shame, might both have been trodden down under the feet of Italy, had her knights and her workmen remained true to each other. But the brotherhoods of Italy were not of Cain to Abel—but of Cain to Cain. Every man's sword was against his fellow. Pisa sank before Genoa at Meloria, the Italian AEgos- Potamos; Genoa before Venice in the war of Chiozza, the Italian siege of Syracuse. Florence sent her Brunelleschi to divert the waves of Serchio against the walls of Lucca; Lucca her Castruccio, to hold mock tournaments before the gates of vanquished Florence. The weak modern Italian reviles or bewails the acts of foreign races, as if his destiny had depended upon these; let him at least assume the pride, and bear the grief, of remembering that, among all the virgin cities of his country, there has not been one which would not ally herself with a stranger, to effect a sister's ruin.

279. Lastly. The impartiality with which I have stated the acts, so far as known to me, and impulses, so far as discernible by me, of the contending Church and Empire, cannot but give offence, or provoke suspicion, in the minds of those among you who are accustomed to hear the cause of Religion supported by eager disciples, or attacked by confessed enemies. My confession of hostility would be open, if I were an enemy indeed; but I have never possessed the knowledge, and have long ago been cured of the pride, which makes men fervent in witness for the Church's virtue, or insolent in declamation against her errors. The will of Heaven, which grants the grace and ordains the diversities of Religion, needs no defence, and sustains no defeat, by the humours of men; and our first business in relation to it is to silence our wishes, and to calm our fears. If, in such modest and disciplined temper, you arrange your increasing knowledge of the history of mankind, you will have no final difficulty in distinguishing the operation of the Master's law from the consequences of the disobedience to it which He permits; nor will you respect the law less, because, accepting only the obedience of love, it neither hastily punishes, nor pompously rewards, with what men think reward or chastisement. Not always under the feet of Korah the earth is rent; not always at the call of Elijah the clouds gather; but the guarding mountains for ever stand round about Jerusalem; and the rain, miraculous evermore, makes green the fields for the evil and the good.

280. And if you will fix your minds only on the conditions of human life which the Giver of it demands, "He hath shown thee, oh man, what is good, and what doth thy Lord require of thee, but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God," you will find that such obedience is always acknowledged by temporal blessing. If, turning from the manifest miseries of cruel ambition, and manifest wanderings of insolent belief, you summon to your thoughts rather the state of unrecorded multitudes, who laboured in silence, and adored in humility, widely as the snows of Christendom brought memory of the Birth of Christ, or her spring sunshine, of His Resurrection, you may know that the promise of the Bethlehem angels has been literally fulfilled; and will pray that your English fields, joyfully as the banks of Arno, may still dedicate their pure lilies to St. Mary of the Flower.



APPENDIX.

(NOTES ON THE PLATES ILLUSTRATING THIS VOLUME.)

In the delivery of the preceding Lectures, some account was given of the theologic design of the sculptures by Giovanni Pisano at Orvieto, which I intended to have printed separately, and in more complete form, in this Appendix. But my strength does not now admit of my fulfilling the half of my intentions, and I find myself, at present, tired, and so dead in feeling, that I have no quickness in interpretation, or skill in description of emotional work. I must content myself, therefore, for the time, with a short statement of the points which I wish the reader to observe in the Plates, and which were left unnoticed in the text.

The frontispiece is the best copy I can get, in permanent materials, of a photograph of the course of the Arno, through Pisa, before the old banks were destroyed. Two arches of the Ponte-a-Mare which was carried away in the inundation of 1870, are seen in the distance; the church of La Spina, in its original position overhanging the river; and the buttressed and rugged walls of the mediaeval shore. Never more, any of these, to be seen in reality, by living eyes.

PLATE I.—A small portion of a photograph of Nicolo Pisano's Adoration of the Magi, on the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery. The intensely Greek character of the heads, and the severely impetuous chiselling (learned from Late Roman rapid work), which drives the lines of the drapery nearly straight, may be seen better in a fragment of this limited measure than in the crowded massing of the entire subject. But it may be observed also that there is both a thoughtfulness and a tenderness in the features, whether of the Virgin or the attendant angel, which already indicate an aim beyond that of Greek art.

PLATE II—The Pulpit of the Baptistery (of which the preceding plate represents a portion). I have only given this general view for convenience of reference. Beautiful photographs of the subject on a large scale are easily attainable.

PLATE III.—The Fountain of Perugia. Executed from a sketch by Mr. Arthur Severn. The perspective of the steps is not quite true; we both tried to get it right, but found that it would be a day or two's work, to little purpose, and so let them go at hazard. The inlaid pattern behind is part of the older wall of the cathedral; the late door is of course inserted.

PLATE IV., LETTER E.—From Norman Bible in the British Museum; showing the moral temper which regulated common ornamentation in the twelfth century.

PLATE V.—Door of the Baptistery at Pisa. The reader must note that, although these plates are necessarily, in fineness of detail, inferior to the photographs from which they are taken, they have the inestimable advantage of permanence, and will not fade away into spectres when the book is old. I am greatly puzzled by the richness of the current ornamentation on the main pillars, as opposed to the general severity of design. I never can understand how the men who indulged in this flowing luxury of foliage were so stern in their masonry and figure- draperies.

PLATE VI.—Part of the lintel of the door represented on Plate V., enlarged. I intended, in the Lecture on Marble Couchant, to have insisted, at some length, on the decoration of the lintel and side- posts, as one of the most important phases of mystic ecclesiastical sculpture. But I find the materials furnished by Lucca, Pisa, and Florence, for such an essay are far too rich to be examined cursorily; the treatment even of this single lintel could scarcely be enough explained in the close of the Lecture. I must dwell on some points of it now.

Look back to Section 175 in "Aratra Pentelici," giving statement of the four kinds of relief in sculpture. The uppermost of these plinths is of the kind I have called 'round relief'; you might strike it out on a coin. The lower is 'foliate relief'; it looks almost as if the figures had been cut out of one layer of marble, and laid against another behind it.

The uppermost, at the distance of my diagram, or in nature itself, would scarcely be distinguished at a careless glance from an egg-and- arrow moulding. You could not have a more simple or forcible illustration of my statement in the first chapter of "Aratra," that the essential business of sculpture is to produce a series of agreeable bosses or rounded surfaces; to which, if possible, some meaning may afterwards be attached. In the present instance, every egg becomes an angel, or evangelist, and every arrow a lily, or a wing. [1] The whole is in the most exquisitely finished Byzantine style.

[Footnote: In the contemporary south door of the Duomo of Genoa, the Greek moulding is used without any such transformation.]

I am not sure of being right in my interpretation of the meaning of these figures; but I think there can be little question about it. There are eleven altogether; the three central, Christ with His mother and St. Joseph; then, two evangelists, with two alternate angels, on each side. Each of these angels carries a rod, with a fleur-de-lys termination; their wings decorate the intermediate ridges (formed, in a pure Greek moulding, by the arrows); and, behind the heads of all the figures, there is now a circular recess; once filled, I doubt not, by a plate of gold. The Christ, and the Evangelists, all carry books, of which each has a mosaic, or intaglio ornament, in the shape of a cross. I could not show you a more severe or perfectly representative piece of architectural sculpture.

The heads of the eleven figures are as simply decorative as the ball flowers are in our English Gothic tracery; the slight irregularity produced by different gesture and character giving precisely the sort of change which a good designer wishes to see in the parts of a consecutive ornament.

The moulding closes at each extremity with a palm-tree, correspondent in execution with those on coins of Syracuse; for the rest, the interest of it consists only in these slight variations of attitude by which the figures express wonder or concern at some event going on in their presence. They are looking down; and I do not doubt, are intended to be the heavenly witnesses of the story engraved on the stone below, —The Life and Death of the Baptist.

The lower stone on which this is related, is a model of skill in Fiction, properly so called. In Fictile art, in Fictile history, it is equally exemplary. 'Feigning' or 'affecting' in the most exquisite way by fastening intensely on the principal points.

Ask yourselves what are the principal points to be insisted on, in the story of the Baptist.

He came, "preaching the Baptism of Repentance for the remission of sins." That is his Advice, or Order-preaching.

And he came, "to bear witness of the Light." "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world." That is his declaration, or revelation-preaching.

And the end of his own life is in the practice of this preaching—if you will think of it—under curious difficulties in both kinds. Difficulties in putting away sin—difficulties in obtaining sight. The first half of the stone begins with the apocalyptic preaching. Christ, represented as in youth, is set under two trees, in the wilderness. St. John is scarcely at first seen; he is only the guide, scarcely the teacher, of the crowd of peoples, nations, and languages, whom he leads, pointing them to the Christ. Without doubt, all these figures have separate meaning. I am too ignorant to interpret it; but observe generally, they are the thoughtful and wise of the earth, not its ruffians or rogues. This is not, by any means, a general amnesty to blackguards, and an apocalypse to brutes, which St. John is preaching. These are quite the best people he can find to call, or advise. You see many of them carry rolls of paper in their hands, as he does himself. In comparison with the books of the upper cornice, these have special meaning, as throughout Byzantine design.