Sec.  I. Of all the buildings in Venice, later in date than the final additions to the Ducal Palace, the noblest is, beyond all question, that which, having been condemned by its proprietor, not many years ago, to be pulled down and sold for the value of its materials, was rescued by the Austrian government, and appropriated ­the government officers having no other use for it ­to the business of the Post-Office; though still known to the gondolier by its ancient name, the Casa Grimani.  It is composed of three stories of the Corinthian order, at once simple, delicate, and sublime; but on so colossal a scale, that the three-storied palaces on its right and left only reach to the cornice which marks the level of its first floor.  Yet it is not at first perceived to be so vast; and it is only when some expedient is employed to hide it from the eye, that by the sudden dwarfing of the whole reach of the Grand Canal, which it commands, we become aware that it is to the majesty of the Casa Grimani that the Rialto itself, and the whole group of neighboring buildings, owe the greater part of their impressiveness.  Nor is the finish of its details less notable than the grandeur of their scale.  There is not an erring line, nor a mistaken proportion, throughout its noble front; and the exceeding fineness of the chiselling gives an appearance of lightness to the vast blocks of stone out of whose perfect union that front is composed.  The decoration is sparing, but delicate:  the first story only simpler than the rest, in that it has pilasters instead of shafts, but all with Corinthian capitals, rich in leafage, and fruited delicately; the rest of the walls flat and smooth, and the mouldings sharp and shallow, so that the bold shafts look like crystals of beryl running through a rock of quartz.

Sec.  II.  This palace is the principal type at Venice, and one of the best in Europe, of the central architecture of the Renaissance schools; that carefully studied and perfectly executed architecture to which those schools owe their principal claims to our respect, and which became the model of most of the important works subsequently produced by civilized nations.  I have called it the Roman Renaissance, because it is founded, both in its principles of superimposition, and in the style of its ornament, upon the architecture of classic Rome at its best period.  The revival of Latin literature both led to its adoption, and directed its form; and the most important example of it which exists is the modern Roman basilica of St. Peter’s.  It had, at its Renaissance or new birth, no resemblance either to Greek, Gothic, or Byzantine forms, except in retaining the use of the round arch, vault, and dome; in the treatment of all details, it was exclusively Latin; the last links of connexion with mediaeval tradition having been broken by its builders in their enthusiasm for classical art, and the forms of true Greek or Athenian architecture being still unknown to them.  The study of these noble Greek forms has induced various modifications of the Renaissance in our own times; but the conditions which are found most applicable to the uses of modern life are still Roman, and the entire style may most fitly be expressed by the term “Roman Renaissance.”

Sec.  III.  It is this style, in its purity and fullest form, ­represented by such buildings as the Casa Grimani at Venice (built by San Micheli), the Town Hall at Vicenza (by Palladio), St. Peter’s at Rome (by Michael Angelo), St. Paul’s and Whitehall in London (by Wren and Inigo Jones), ­which is the true antagonist of the Gothic school.  The intermediate, or corrupt conditions of it, though multiplied over Europe, are no longer admired by architects, or made the subjects of their study; but the finished work of this central school is still, in most cases, the model set before the student of the nineteenth century, as opposed to those Gothic, Romanesque, or Byzantine forms which have long been considered barbarous, and are so still by most of the leading men of the day.  That they are, on the contrary, most noble and beautiful, and that the antagonistic Renaissance is, in the main, unworthy and unadmirable, whatever perfection of a certain kind it may possess, it was my principal purpose to show, when I first undertook the labor of this work.  It has been attempted already to put before the reader the various elements which unite in the Nature of Gothic, and to enable him thus to judge, not merely of the beauty of the forms which that system has produced already, but of its future applicability to the wants of mankind, and endless power over their hearts.  I would now endeavor, in like manner, to set before the reader the Nature of Renaissance, and thus to enable him to compare the two styles under the same light, and with the same enlarged view of their relations to the intellect, and capacities for the service, of man.

Sec.  IV.  It will not be necessary for me to enter at length into any examination of its external form.  It uses, whether for its roofs of aperture or roofs proper, the low gable or circular arch:  but it differs from Romanesque work in attaching great importance to the horizontal lintel or architrave above the arch; transferring the energy of the principal shafts to the supporting of this horizontal beam, and thus rendering the arch a subordinate, if not altogether a superfluous, feature.  The type of this arrangement has been given already at c, Fig.  XXXVI., , Vol.  I.:  and I might insist at length upon the absurdity of a construction in which the shorter shaft, which has the real weight of wall to carry, is split into two by the taller one, which has nothing to carry at all, ­that taller one being strengthened, nevertheless, as if the whole weight of the building bore upon it; and on the ungracefulness, never conquered in any Palladian work, of the two half-capitals glued, as it were, against the slippery round sides of the central shaft.  But it is not the form of this architecture against which I would plead.  Its defects are shared by many of the noblest forms of earlier building, and might have been entirely atoned for by excellence of spirit.  But it is the moral nature of it which is corrupt, and which it must, therefore, be our principal business to examine and expose.

Sec.  V. The moral, or immoral, elements which unite to form the spirit of Central Renaissance architecture are, I believe, in the main, two, ­Pride and Infidelity; but the pride resolves itself into three main branches, ­Pride of Science, Pride of State, and Pride of System:  and thus we have four separate mental conditions which must be examined successively.

Sec.  V.  PRIDE OF SCIENCE.  It would have been more charitable, but more confusing, to have added another element to our list, namely the Love of Science; but the love is included in the pride, and is usually so very subordinate an element that it does not deserve equality of nomenclature.  But, whether pursued in pride or in affection (how far by either we shall see presently), the first notable characteristic of the Renaissance central school is its introduction of accurate knowledge into all its work, so far as it possesses such knowledge; and its evident conviction, that such science is necessary to the excellence of the work, and is the first thing to be expressed therein.  So that all the forms introduced, even in its minor ornament, are studied with the utmost care; the anatomy of all animal structure is thoroughly understood and elaborately expressed, and the whole of the execution skilful and practised in the highest degree.  Perspective, linear and aerial, perfect drawing and accurate light and shade in painting, and true anatomy in all representations of the human form, drawn or sculptured, are the first requirements in all the work of this school.

Sec.  VII.  Now, first considering all this in the most charitable light, as pursued from a real love of truth, and not from vanity, it would, of course, have been all excellent and admirable, had it been regarded as the aid of art, and not as its essence.  But the grand mistake of the Renaissance schools lay in supposing that science and art are the same things, and that to advance in the one was necessarily to perfect the other.  Whereas they are, in reality, things not only different, but so opposed, that to advance in the one is, in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred, to retrograde in the other.  This is the point to which I would at present especially bespeak the reader’s attention.

Sec.  VIII.  Science and art are commonly distinguished by the nature of their actions; the one as knowing, the other as changing, producing, or creating.  But there is a still more important distinction in the nature of the things they deal with.  Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human senses and human soul. Her work is to portray the appearance of things, and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce upon living creatures.  The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.  Both, observe, are equally concerned with truth; the one with truth of aspect, the other with truth of essence.  Art does not represent things falsely, but truly as they appear to mankind.  Science studies the relations of things to each other:  but art studies only their relations to man; and it requires of everything which is submitted to it imperatively this, and only this, ­what that thing is to the human eyes and human heart, what it has to say to men, and what it can become to them:  a field of question just as much vaster than that of science, as the soul is larger than the material creation.

Sec.  IX.  Take a single instance.  Science informs us that the sun is ninety-five millions of miles distant from, and 111 times broader than, the earth; that we and all the planets revolve round it; and that it revolves on its own axis in 25 days, 14 hours and 4 minutes.  With all this, art has nothing whatsoever to do.  It has no care to know anything of this kind.  But the things which it does care to know, are these:  that in the heavens God hath set a tabernacle for the sun, “which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.  His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.”

Sec.  X. This, then, being the kind of truth with which art is exclusively concerned, how is such truth as this to be ascertained and accumulated?  Evidently, and only, by perception and feeling.  Never either by reasoning, or report.  Nothing must come between Nature and the artist’s sight; nothing between God and the artist’s soul.  Neither calculation nor hearsay, ­be it the most subtle of calculations, or the wisest of sayings, ­may be allowed to come between the universe, and the witness which art bears to its visible nature.  The whole value of that witness depends on its being eye-witness; the whole genuineness, acceptableness, and dominion of it depend on the personal assurance of the man who utters it.  All its victory depends on the veracity of the one preceding word, “Vidi.”

The whole function of the artist in the world is to be a seeing and feeling creature; to be an instrument of such tenderness and sensitiveness, that no shadow, no hue, no line, no instantaneous and evanescent expression of the visible things around him, nor any of the emotions which they are capable of conveying to the spirit which has been given him, shall either be left unrecorded, or fade from the book of record.  It is not his business either to think, to judge, to argue, or to know.  His place is neither in the closet, nor on the bench, nor at the bar, nor in the library.  They are for other men and other work.  He may think, in a by-way; reason, now and then, when he has nothing better to do; know, such fragments of knowledge as he can gather without stooping, or reach without pains; but none of these things are to be his care.  The work of his life is to be twofold only:  to see, to feel.

Sec.  XI.  Nay, but, the reader perhaps pleads with me, one of the great uses of knowledge is to open the eyes; to make things perceivable which, never would have been seen, unless first they had been known.

Not so.  This could only be said or believed by those who do not know what the perceptive faculty of a great artist is, in comparison with that of other men.  There is no great painter, no great workman in any art, but he sees more with the glance of a moment than he could learn by the labor of a thousand hours.  God has made every man fit for his work; He has given to the man whom he means for a student, the reflective, logical, sequential faculties; and to the man whom He means for an artist, the perceptive, sensitive, retentive faculties.  And neither of these men, so far from being able to do the other’s work, can even comprehend the way in which it is done.  The student has no understanding of the vision, nor the painter of the process; but chiefly the student has no idea of the colossal grasp of the true painter’s vision and sensibility.

The labor of the whole Geological Society, for the last fifty years, has but now arrived at the ascertainment of those truths respecting mountain form which Turner saw and expressed with a few strokes of a camel’s hair pencil fifty years ago, when he was a boy.  The knowledge of all the laws of the planetary system, and of all the curves of the motion of projectiles, would never enable the man of science to draw a waterfall or a wave; and all the members of Surgeons’ Hall helping each other could not at this moment see, or represent, the natural movement of a human body in vigorous action, as a poor dyer’s son did two hundred years ago.

Sec.  XII.  But surely, it is still insisted, granting this peculiar faculty to the painter, he will still see more as he knows more, and the more knowledge he obtains, therefore, the better.  No; not even so.  It is indeed true, that, here and there, a piece of knowledge will enable the eye to detect a truth which might otherwise have escaped it; as, for instance, in watching a sunrise, the knowledge of the true nature of the orb may lead the painter to feel more profoundly, and express more fully, the distance between the bars of cloud that cross it, and the sphere of flame that lifts itself slowly beyond them into the infinite heaven.  But, for one visible truth to which knowledge thus opens the eyes, it seals them to a thousand:  that is to say, if the knowledge occur to the mind so as to occupy its powers of contemplation at the moment when the sight work is to be done, the mind retires inward, fixes itself upon the known fact, and forgets the passing visible ones; and a moment of such forgetfulness loses more to the painter than a day’s thought can gain.  This is no new or strange assertion.  Every person accustomed to careful reflection of any kind, knows that its natural operation is to close his eyes to the external world.  While he is thinking deeply, he neither sees nor feels, even though naturally he may possess strong powers of sight and emotion.  He who, having journeyed all day beside the Leman Lake, asked of his companions, at evening, where it was, probably was not wanting in sensibility; but he was generally a thinker, not a perceiver.  And this instance is only an extreme one of the effect which, in all cases, knowledge, becoming a subject of reflection, produces upon the sensitive faculties.  It must be but poor and lifeless knowledge, if it has no tendency to force itself forward, and become ground for reflection, in despite of the succession of external objects.  It will not obey their succession.  The first that comes gives it food enough for its day’s work; it is its habit, its duty, to cast the rest aside, and fasten upon that.  The first thing that a thinking and knowing man sees in the course of the day, he will not easily quit.  It is not his way to quit anything without getting to the bottom of it, if possible.  But the artist is bound to receive all things on the broad, white, lucid field of his soul, not to grasp at one.  For instance, as the knowing and thinking man watches the sunrise, he sees something in the color of a ray, or the change of a cloud, that is new to him; and this he follows out forthwith into a labyrinth of optical and pneumatical laws, perceiving no more clouds nor rays all the morning.  But the painter must catch all the rays, all the colors that come, and see them all truly, all in their real relations and succession; therefore, everything that occupies room in his mind he must cast aside for the time, as completely as may be.  The thoughtful man is gone far away to seek; but the perceiving man must sit still, and open his heart to receive.  The thoughtful man is knitting and sharpening himself into a two-edged sword, wherewith to pierce.  The perceiving man is stretching himself into a four-cornered sheet wherewith to catch.  And all the breadth to which he can expand himself, and all the white emptiness into which he can blanch himself, will not be enough to receive what God has to give him.

Sec.  XIII.  What, then, it will be indignantly asked, is an utterly ignorant and unthinking man likely to make the best artist?  No, not so neither.  Knowledge is good for him so long as he can keep it utterly, servilely, subordinate to his own divine work, and trample it under his feet, and out of his way, the moment it is likely to entangle him.

And in this respect, observe, there is an enormous difference between knowledge and education.  An artist need not be a learned man, in all probability it will be a disadvantage to him to become so; but he ought, if possible, always to be an educated man:  that is, one who has understanding of his own uses and duties in the world, and therefore of the general nature of the things done and existing in the world; and who has so trained himself, or been trained, as to turn to the best and most courteous account whatever faculties or knowledge he has.  The mind of an educated man is greater than the knowledge it possesses; it is like the vault of heaven, encompassing the earth which lives and flourishes beneath it:  but the mind of an educated and learned man is like a caoutchouc band, with an everlasting spirit of contraction in it, fastening together papers which it cannot open, and keeps others from opening.

Half our artists are ruined for want of education, and by the possession of knowledge; the best that I have known have been educated, and illiterate.  The ideal of an artist, however, is not that he should be illiterate, but well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and in bearing.  In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keep out of it.

Sec.  XIV.  There are, indeed, some kinds of knowledge with which an artist ought to be thoroughly furnished; those, for instance, which enable him to express himself; for this knowledge relieves instead of encumbering his mind, and permits it to attend to its purposes instead of wearying itself about means.  The whole mystery of manipulation and manufacture should be familiar to the painter from a child.  He should know the chemistry of all colors and materials whatsoever, and should prepare all his colors himself, in a little laboratory of his own.  Limiting his chemistry to this one object, the amount of practical science necessary for it, and such accidental discoveries as might fall in his way in the course of his work, of better colors or better methods of preparing them, would be an infinite refreshment to his mind; a minor subject of interest to which it might turn when jaded with comfortless labor, or exhausted with feverish invention, and yet which would never interfere with its higher functions, when it chose to address itself to them.  Even a considerable amount of manual labor, sturdy color-grinding and canvas-stretching, would be advantageous; though this kind of work ought to be in great part done by pupils.  For it is one of the conditions of perfect knowledge in these matters, that every great master should have a certain number of pupils, to whom he is to impart all the knowledge of materials and means which he himself possesses, as soon as possible; so that, at any rate, by the time they are fifteen years old, they may know all that he knows himself in this kind; that is to say, all that the world of artists know, and his own discoveries besides, and so never be troubled about methods any more.  Not that the knowledge even of his own particular methods is to be of purpose confined to himself and his pupils, but that necessarily it must be so in some degree; for only those who see him at work daily can understand his small and multitudinous ways of practice.  These cannot verbally be explained to everybody, nor is it needful that they should, only let them be concealed from nobody who cares to see them; in which case, of course, his attendant scholars will know them best.  But all that can be made public in matters of this kind should be so with all speed, every artist throwing his discovery into the common stock, and the whole body of artists taking such pains in this department of science as that there shall be no unsettled questions about any known material or method:  that it shall be an entirely ascertained and indisputable matter which is the best white, and which the best brown; which the strongest canvas, and safest varnish; and which the shortest and most perfect way of doing everything known up to that time:  and if any one discovers a better, he is to make it public forthwith.  All of them taking care to embarrass themselves with no theories or reasons for anything, but to work empirically only:  it not being in any wise their business to know whether light moves in rays or in waves; or whether the blue rays of the spectrum move slower or faster than the rest; but simply to know how many minutes and seconds such and such a powder must be calcined, to give the brightest blue.

Sec.  XV.  Now it is perhaps the most exquisite absurdity of the whole Renaissance system, that while it has encumbered the artist with every species of knowledge that is of no use to him, this one precious and necessary knowledge it has utterly lost.  There is not, I believe, at this moment, a single question which could be put respecting pigments and methods, on which the body of living artists would agree in their answers.  The lives of artists are passed in fruitless experiments; fruitless, because undirected by experience and uncommunicated in their results.  Every man has methods of his own, which he knows to be insufficient, and yet jealously conceals from his fellow-workmen:  every colorman has materials of his own, to which it is rare that the artist can trust:  and in the very front of the majestic advance of chemical science, the empirical science of the artist has been annihilated, and the days which should have led us to higher perfection are passed in guessing at, or in mourning over, lost processes; while the so-called Dark ages, possessing no more knowledge of chemistry than a village herbalist does now, discovered, established, and put into daily practice such methods of operation as have made their work, at this day, the despair of all who look upon it.

Sec.  XVI.  And yet even this, to the painter, the safest of sciences, and in some degree necessary, has its temptations, and capabilities of abuse.  For the simplest means are always enough for a great man; and when once he has obtained a few ordinary colors, which he is sure will stand, and a white surface that will not darken nor moulder, nor rend, he is master of the world, and of his fellow-men.  And, indeed, as if in these times we were bent on furnishing examples of every species of opposite error, while we have suffered the traditions to escape us of the simple methods of doing simple things, which are enough for all the arts, and to all the ages, we have set ourselves to discover fantastic modes of doing fantastic things, ­new mixtures and manipulations of metal, and porcelain, and leather, and paper, and every conceivable condition of false substance and cheap work, to our own infinitely multiplied confusion, ­blinding ourselves daily more and more to the great, changeless, and inevitable truth, that there is but one goodness in art; and that is one which the chemist cannot prepare, nor the merchant cheapen, for it comes only of a rare human hand, and rare human soul.

Sec.  XVII.  Within its due limits, however, here is one branch of science which the artist may pursue; and, within limits still more strict, another also, namely, the science of the appearances of things as they have been ascertained and registered by his fellow-men.  For no day passes but some visible fact is pointed out to us by others, which, without their help, we should not have noticed; and the accumulation and generalization of visible facts have formed, in the succession of ages, the sciences of light and shade, and perspective, linear and aerial:  so that the artist is now at once put in possession of certain truths respecting the appearances of things, which, so pointed out to him, any man may in a few days understand and acknowledge; but which, without aid, he could not probably discover in his lifetime.  I say, probably could not, because the time which the history of art shows us to have been actually occupied in the discovery and systematization of such truth, is no measure of the time necessary for such discovery.  The lengthened period which elapsed between the earliest and the perfect developement of the science of light (if I may so call it) was not occupied in the actual effort to ascertain its laws, but in acquiring the disposition to make that effort.  It did not take five centuries to find out the appearance of natural objects; but it took five centuries to make people care about representing them.  An artist of the twelfth century did not desire to represent nature.  His work was symbolical and ornamental.  So long as it was intelligible and lovely, he had no care to make it like nature.  As, for instance, when an old painter represented the glory round a saint’s head by a burnished plate of pure gold, he had no intention of imitating an effect of light.  He meant to tell the spectator that the figure so decorated was a saint, and to produce splendor of effect by the golden circle.  It was no matter to him what light was like.  So soon as it entered into his intention to represent the appearance of light, he was not long in discovering the natural facts necessary for his purpose.

Sec.  XVIII.  But, this being fully allowed, it is still true that the accumulation of facts now known respecting visible phenomena, is greater than any man could hope to gather for himself, and that it is well for him to be made acquainted with them; provided always, that he receive them only at their true value, and do not suffer himself to be misled by them.  I say, at their true value; that is, an exceedingly small one.  All the information which men can receive from the accumulated experience of others, is of no use but to enable them more quickly and accurately to see for themselves.  It will in no wise take the place of this personal sight.  Nothing can be done well in art, except by vision.  Scientific principles and experiences are helps to the eye, as a microscope is; and they are of exactly as much use without the eye.  No science of perspective, or of anything else, will enable us to draw the simplest natural line accurately, unless we see it and feel it.  Science is soon at her wits’ end.  All the professors of perspective in Europe, could not, by perspective, draw the line of curve of a sea beach; nay, could not outline one pool of the quiet water left among the sand.  The eye and hand can do it, nothing else.  All the rules of aerial perspective that ever were written, will not tell me how sharply the pines on the hill-top are drawn at this moment on the sky.  I shall know if I see them, and love them; not till then.  I may study the laws of atmospheric gradation for fourscore years and ten, and I shall not be able to draw so much as a brick-kiln through its own smoke, unless I look at it; and that in an entirely humble and unscientific manner, ready to see all that the smoke, my master, is ready to show me, and expecting to see nothing more.

Sec.  XIX.  So that all the knowledge a man has must be held cheap, and neither trusted nor respected, the moment he comes face to face with Nature.  If it help him, well; if not, but, on the contrary, thrust itself upon him in an impertinent and contradictory temper, and venture to set itself in the slightest degree in opposition to, or comparison with, his sight, let it be disgraced forthwith.  And the slave is less likely to take too much upon herself, if she has not been bought for a high price.  All the knowledge an artist needs, will, in these days, come to him almost without his seeking; if he has far to look for it, he may be sure he does not want it.  Prout became Prout, without knowing a single rule of perspective to the end of his days; and all the perspective in the Encyclopædia will never produce us another Prout.

Sec.  XX.  And observe, also, knowledge is not only very often unnecessary, but it is often untrustworthy.  It is inaccurate, and betrays us where the eye would have been true to us.  Let us take the single instance of the knowledge of aerial perspective, of which the moderns are so proud, and see how it betrays us in various ways.  First by the conceit of it, which often prevents our enjoying work in which higher and better things were thought of than effects of mist.  The other day I showed a line impression of Albert Durer’s “St. Hubert” to a modern engraver, who had never seen it nor any other of Albert Durer’s works.  He looked at it for a minute contemptuously, then turned away:  “Ah, I see that man did not know much about aerial perspective!” All the glorious work and thought of the mighty master, all the redundant landscape, the living vegetation, the magnificent truth of line, were dead letters to him, because he happened to have been taught one particular piece of knowledge which Durer despised.

Sec.  XXI.  But not only in the conceit of it, but in the inaccuracy of it, this science betrays us.  Aerial perspective, as given by the modern artist, is, in nine cases out of ten, a gross and ridiculous exaggeration, as is demonstrable in a moment.  The effect of air in altering the hue and depth of color is of course great in the exact proportion of the volume of air between the observer and the object.  It is not violent within the first few yards, and then diminished gradually, but it is equal for each foot of interposing air.  Now in a clear day, and clear climate, such as that generally presupposed in a work of fine color, objects are completely visible at a distance of ten miles; visible in light and shade, with gradations between the two.  Take, then, the faintest possible hue of shadow, or of any color, and the most violent and positive possible, and set them side by side.  The interval between them is greater than the real difference (for objects may often be seen clearly much farther than ten miles, I have seen Mont Blanc at 120) caused by the ten miles of intervening air between any given hue of the nearest, and most distant, objects; but let us assume it, in courtesy to the masters of aerial perspective, to be the real difference.  Then roughly estimating a mile at less than it really is, also in courtesy to them, or at 5000 feet, we have this difference between tints produced by 50,000 feet of air.  Then, ten feet of air will produce the 5000th part of this difference.  Let the reader take the two extreme tints, and carefully gradate the one into the other.  Let him divide this gradated shadow or color into 5000 successive parts; and the difference in depth between one of these parts and the next is the exact amount of aerial perspective between one object, and another, ten feet behind it, on a clear day.

Sec.  XXII.  Now, in Millais’ “Huguenot,” the figures were standing about three feet from the wall behind them; and the wise world of critics, which could find no other fault with the picture, professed to have its eyes hurt by the want of an aerial perspective, which, had it been accurately given (as, indeed, I believe it was), would have amounted to the 10/3-5000th, or less than the 15,000th part of the depth of any given color.  It would be interesting to see a picture painted by the critics, upon this scientific principle.  The aerial perspective usually represented is entirely conventional and ridiculous; a mere struggle on the part of the pretendedly well-informed, but really ignorant, artist, to express distances by mist which he cannot by drawing.

It is curious that the critical world is just as much offended by the true presence of aerial perspective, over distances of fifty miles, and with definite purpose of representing mist, in the works of Turner, as by the true absence of aerial perspective, over distances of three feet, and in clear weather, in those of Millais.

Sec.  XXIII.  “Well but,” still answers the reader, “this kind of error may here and there be occasioned by too much respect for undigested knowledge; but, on the whole, the gain is greater than the loss, and the fact is, that a picture of the Renaissance period, or by a modern master, does indeed represent nature more faithfully than one wrought in the ignorance of old times.”  No, not one whit; for the most part less faithfully.  Indeed, the outside of nature is more truly drawn; the material commonplace, which can be systematized, catalogued, and taught to all pains-taking mankind, ­forms of ribs and scapulae, of eyebrows and lips, and curls of hair.  Whatever can be measured and handled, dissected and demonstrated, ­in a word, whatever is of the body only, ­that the schools of knowledge do resolutely and courageously possess themselves of, and portray.  But whatever is immeasurable, intangible, indivisible, and of the spirit, that the schools of knowledge do as certainly lose, and blot out of their sight, that is to say, all that is worth art’s possessing or recording at all; for whatever can be arrested, measured, and systematized, we can contemplate as much as we will in nature herself.  But what we want art to do for us is to stay what is fleeting, and to enlighten what is incomprehensible, to incorporate the things that have no measure, and immortalize the things that have no duration.  The dimly seen, momentary glance, the flitting shadow of faint emotion, the imperfect lines of fading thought, and all that by and through such things as these is recorded on the features of man, and all that in man’s person and actions, and in the great natural world, is infinite and wonderful; having in it that spirit and power which man may witness, but not weigh; conceive, but not comprehend; love, but not limit; and imagine, but not define; ­this, the beginning and the end of the aim of all noble art, we have, in the ancient art, by perception; and we have not, in the newer art, by knowledge.  Giotto gives it us, Orcagna gives it us.  Angelico, Memmi, Pisano, it matters not who, ­all simple and unlearned men, in their measure and manner, ­give it us; and the learned men that followed them give it us not, and we, in our supreme learning, own ourselves at this day farther from it than ever.

Sec.  XXIV.  “Nay,” but it is still answered, “this is because we have not yet brought our knowledge into right use, but have been seeking to accumulate it, rather than to apply it wisely to the ends of art.  Let us now do this, and we may achieve all that was done by that elder ignorant art, and infinitely more.”  No, not so; for as soon as we try to put our knowledge to good use, we shall find that we have much more than we can use, and that what more we have is an encumbrance.  All our errors in this respect arise from a gross misconception as to the true nature of knowledge itself.  We talk of learned and ignorant men, as if there were a certain quantity of knowledge, which to possess was to be learned, and which not to possess was to be ignorant; instead of considering that knowledge is infinite, and that the man most learned in human estimation is just as far from knowing anything as he ought to know it, as the unlettered peasant.  Men are merely on a lower or higher stage of an eminence, whose summit is God’s throne, infinitely above all; and there is just as much reason for the wisest as for the simplest man being discontented with his position, as respects the real quantity of knowledge he possesses.  And, for both of them, the only true reasons for contentment with the sum of knowledge they possess are these:  that it is the kind of knowledge they need for their duty and happiness in life; that all they have is tested and certain, so far as it is in their power; that all they have is well in order, and within reach when they need it; that it has not cost too much time in the getting; that none of it, once got, has been lost; and that there is not too much to be easily taken care of.

Sec.  XXV.  Consider these requirements a little, and the evils that result in our education and polity from neglecting them.  Knowledge is mental food, and is exactly to the spirit what food is to the body (except that the spirit needs several sorts of food, of which knowledge is only one), and it is liable to the same kind of misuses.  It may be mixed and disguised by art, till it becomes unwholesome; it may be refined, sweetened, and made palatable, until it has lost all its power of nourishment; and, even of its best kind, it may be eaten to surfeiting, and minister to disease and death.

Sec.  XXVI.  Therefore, with respect to knowledge, we are to reason and act exactly as with respect to food.  We no more live to know, than we live to eat.  We live to contemplate, enjoy, act, adore; and we may know all that is to be known in this world, and what Satan knows in the other, without being able to do any of these.  We are to ask, therefore, first, is the knowledge we would have fit food for us, good and simple, not artificial and decorated? and secondly, how much of it will enable us best for our work; and will leave our hearts light, and our eyes clear?  For no more than that is to be eaten without the old Eve-sin.

Sec.  XXVII.  Observe, also, the difference between tasting knowledge, and hoarding it.  In this respect it is also like food; since, in some measure, the knowledge of all men is laid up in granaries, for future use; much of it is at any given moment dormant, not fed upon or enjoyed, but in store.  And by all it is to be remembered, that knowledge in this form may be kept without air till it rots, or in such unthreshed disorder that it is of no use; and that, however good or orderly, it is still only in being tasted that it becomes of use; and that men may easily starve in their own granaries, men of science, perhaps, most of all, for they are likely to seek accumulation of their store, rather than nourishment from it.  Yet let it not be thought that I would undervalue them.  The good and great among them are like Joseph, to whom all nations sought to buy corn; or like the sower going forth to sow beside all waters, sending forth thither the feet of the ox and the ass:  only let us remember that this is not all men’s work.  We are not intended to be all keepers of granaries, nor all to be measured by the filling of a storehouse; but many, nay, most of us, are to receive day by day our daily bread, and shall be as well nourished and as fit for our labor, and often, also, fit for nobler and more divine labor, in feeding from the barrel of meal that does not waste, and from the cruse of oil that does not fail, than if our barns were filled with plenty, and our presses bursting out with new wine.

Sec.  XXVIII.  It is for each man to find his own measure in this matter; in great part, also, for others to find it for him, while he is yet a youth.  And the desperate evil of the whole Renaissance system is, that all idea of measure is therein forgotten, that knowledge is thought the one and the only good, and it is never inquired whether men are vivified by it or paralyzed.  Let us leave figures.  The reader may not believe the analogy I have been pressing so far; but let him consider the subject in itself, let him examine the effect of knowledge in his own heart, and see whether the trees of knowledge and of life are one now, any more than in Paradise.  He must feel that the real animating power of knowledge is only in the moment of its being first received, when it fills us with wonder and joy; a joy for which, observe, the previous ignorance is just as necessary as the present knowledge.  That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.  This is the necessary condition of a finite creature with divinely rooted and divinely directed intelligence; this, therefore, its happy state, ­but observe, a state, not of triumph or joy in what it knows, but of joy rather in the continual discovery of new ignorance, continual self-abasement, continual astonishment.  Once thoroughly our own, the knowledge ceases to give us pleasure.  It may be practically useful to us, it may be good for others, or good for usury to obtain more; but, in itself, once let it be thoroughly familiar, and it is dead.  The wonder is gone from it, and all the fine color which it had when first we drew it up out of the infinite sea.  And what does it matter how much or how little of it we have laid aside, when our only enjoyment is still in the casting of that deep sea line?  What does it matter?  Nay, in one respect, it matters much, and not to our advantage.  For one effect of knowledge is to deaden the force of the imagination and the original energy of the whole man:  under the weight of his knowledge he cannot move so lightly as in the days of his simplicity.  The pack-horse is furnished for the journey, the war-horse is armed for war; but the freedom of the field and the lightness of the limb are lost for both.  Knowledge is, at best, the pilgrim’s burden or the soldier’s panoply, often a weariness to them both:  and the Renaissance knowledge is like the Renaissance armor of plate, binding and cramping the human form; while all good knowledge is like the crusader’s chain mail, which throws itself into folds with the body, yet it is rarely so forged as that the clasps and rivets do not gall us.  All men feel this, though they do not think of it, nor reason out its consequences.  They look back to the days of childhood as of greatest happiness, because those were the days of greatest wonder, greatest simplicity, and most vigorous imagination.  And the whole difference between a man of genius and other men, it has been said a thousand times, and most truly, is that the first remains in great part a child, seeing with the large eyes of children, in perpetual wonder, not conscious of much knowledge, ­conscious, rather, of infinite ignorance, and yet infinite power; a fountain of eternal admiration, delight, and creative force within him meeting the ocean of visible and governable things around him.

That is what we have to make men, so far as we may.  All are to be men of genius in their degree, ­rivulets or rivers, it does not matter, so that the souls be clear and pure; not dead walls encompassing dead heaps of things known and numbered, but running waters in the sweet wilderness of things unnumbered and unknown, conscious only of the living banks, on which they partly refresh and partly reflect the flowers, and so pass on.

Sec.  XXIX.  Let each man answer for himself how far his knowledge has made him this, or how far it is loaded upon him as the pyramid is upon the tomb.  Let him consider, also, how much of it has cost him labor and time that might have been spent in healthy, happy action, beneficial to all mankind; how many living souls may have been left uncomforted and unhelped by him, while his own eyes were failing by the midnight lamp; how many warm sympathies have died within him as he measured lines or counted letters; how many draughts of ocean air, and steps on mountain-turf, and openings of the highest heaven he has lost for his knowledge; how much of that knowledge, so dearly bought, is now forgotten or despised, leaving only the capacity of wonder less within him, and, as it happens in a thousand instances, perhaps even also the capacity of devotion.  And let him, ­if, after thus dealing with his own heart, he can say that his knowledge has indeed been fruitful to him, ­yet consider how many there are who have been forced by the inevitable laws of modern education into toil utterly repugnant to their natures, and that in the extreme, until the whole strength of the young soul was sapped away; and then pronounce with fearfulness how far, and in how many senses, it may indeed be true that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

Sec.  XXX.  Now all this possibility of evil, observe, attaches to knowledge pursued for the noblest ends, if it be pursued imprudently.  I have assumed, in speaking of its effect both on men generally and on the artist especially, that it was sought in the true love of it, and with all honesty and directness of purpose.  But this is granting far too much in its favor.  Of knowledge in general, and without qualification, it is said by the Apostle that “it puffeth up;” and the father of all modern science, writing directly in its praise, yet asserts this danger even in more absolute terms, calling it a “venomousness” in the very nature of knowledge itself.

Sec.  XXXI.  There is, indeed, much difference in this respect between the tendencies of different branches of knowledge; it being a sure rule that exactly in proportion as they are inferior, nugatory, or limited in scope, their power of feeding pride is greater.  Thus philology, logic, rhetoric, and the other sciences of the schools, being for the most part ridiculous and trifling, have so pestilent an effect upon those who are devoted to them, that their students cannot conceive of any higher sciences than these, but fancy that all education ends in the knowledge of words:  but the true and great sciences, more especially natural history, make men gentle and modest in proportion to the largeness of their apprehension, and just perception of the infiniteness of the things they can never know.  And this, it seems to me, is the principal lesson we are intended to be caught by the book of Job; for there God has thrown open to us the heart of a man most just and holy, and apparently perfect in all things possible to human nature except humility.  For this he is tried:  and we are shown that no suffering, no self-examination, however honest, however stern, no searching out of the heart by its own bitterness, is enough to convince man of his nothingness before God; but that the sight of God’s creation will do it.  For, when the Deity himself has willed to end the temptation, and to accomplish in Job that for which it was sent, He does not vouchsafe to reason with him, still less does He overwhelm him with terror, or confound him by laying open before his eyes the book of his iniquities.  He opens before him only the arch of the dayspring, and the fountains of the deep; and amidst the covert of the reeds, and on the heaving waves, He bids him watch the kings of the children of pride, ­“Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee:”  And the work is done.

Sec.  XXXII.  Thus, if, I repeat, there is any one lesson in the whole book which stands forth more definitely than another, it is this of the holy and humbling influence of natural science on the human heart.  And yet, even here, it is not the science, but the perception, to which the good is owing; and the natural sciences may become as harmful as any others, when they lose themselves in classification and catalogue-making.  Still, the principal danger is with the sciences of words and methods; and it was exactly into those sciences that the whole energy of men during the Renaissance period was thrown.  They discovered suddenly that the world for ten centuries had been living in an ungrammatical manner, and they made it forthwith the end of human existence to be grammatical.  And it mattered thenceforth nothing what was said, or what was done, so only that it was said with scholarship, and done with system.  Falsehood in a Ciceronian dialect had no opposers; truth in patois no listeners.  A Roman phrase was thought worth any number of Gothic facts.  The sciences ceased at once to be anything more than different kinds of grammars, ­grammar of language, grammar of logic, grammar of ethics, grammar of art; and the tongue, wit, and invention of the human race were supposed to have found their utmost and most divine mission in syntax and syllogism, perspective and five orders.

Of such knowledge as this, nothing but pride could come; and, therefore, I have called the first mental characteristic of the Renaissance schools, the “pride” of science.  If they had reached any science worth the name, they might have loved it; but of the paltry knowledge they possessed, they could only be proud.  There was not anything in it capable of being loved.  Anatomy, indeed, then first made a subject of accurate study, is a true science, but not so attractive as to enlist the affections strongly on its side:  and therefore, like its meaner sisters, it became merely a ground for pride; and the one main purpose of the Renaissance artists, in all their work, was to show how much they knew.

Sec.  XXXIII.  There were, of course, noble exceptions; but chiefly belonging to the earliest periods of the Renaissance, when its teaching had not yet produced its full effect.  Raphael, Leonardo, and Michael Angelo were all trained in the old school; they all had masters who knew the true ends of art, and had reached them; masters nearly as great as they were themselves, but imbued with the old religious and earnest spirit, which their disciples receiving from them, and drinking at the same time deeply from all the fountains of knowledge opened in their day, became the world’s wonders.  Then the dull wondering world believed that their greatness rose out of their new knowledge, instead of out of that ancient religious root, in which to abide was life, from which to be severed was annihilation.  And from that day to this, they have tried to produce Michael Angelos and Leonardos by teaching the barren sciences, and still have mourned and marvelled that no more Michael Angelos came; not perceiving that those great Fathers were only able to receive such nourishment because they were rooted on the rock of all ages, and that our scientific teaching, nowadays, is nothing more nor less than the assiduous watering of trees whose stems are cut through.  Nay, I have even granted too much in saying that those great men were able to receive pure nourishment from the sciences; for my own conviction is, and I know it to be shared by most of those who love Raphael truly, ­that he painted best when he knew least.  Michael Angelo was betrayed, again and again, into such vain and offensive exhibition of his anatomical knowledge as, to this day, renders his higher powers indiscernible by the greater part of men; and Leonardo fretted his life away in engineering, so that there is hardly a picture left to bear his name.  But, with respect to all who followed, there can be no question that the science they possessed was utterly harmful; serving merely to draw away their hearts at once from the purposes of art and the power of nature, and to make, out of the canvas and marble, nothing more than materials for the exhibition of petty dexterity and useless knowledge.

Sec.  XXXIV.  It is sometimes amusing to watch the naïve and childish way in which this vanity is shown.  For instance, when perspective was first invented, the world thought it a mighty discovery, and the greatest men it had in it were as proud of knowing that retiring lines converge, as if all the wisdom of Solomon had been compressed into a vanishing point.  And, accordingly, it became nearly impossible for any one to paint a Nativity, but he must turn the stable and manger into a Corinthian arcade, in order to show his knowledge of perspective; and half the best architecture of the time, instead of being adorned with historical sculpture, as of old, was set forth with bas-relief of minor corridors and galleries, thrown into perspective.

Now that perspective can be taught to any schoolboy in a week, we can smile at this vanity.  But the fact is, that all pride in knowledge is precisely as ridiculous, whatever its kind, or whatever its degree.  There is, indeed, nothing of which man has any right to be proud; but the very last thing of which, with any show of reason, he can make his boast is his knowledge, except only that infinitely small portion of it which he has discovered for himself.  For what is there to be more proud of in receiving a piece of knowledge from another person, than in receiving a piece of money?  Beggars should not be proud, whatever kind of alms they receive.  Knowledge is like current coin.  A man may have some right to be proud of possessing it, if he has worked for the gold of it, and assayed it, and stamped it, so that it may be received of all men as true; or earned it fairly, being already assayed:  but if he has done none of these things, but only had it thrown in his face by a passer-by, what cause has he to be proud?  And though, in this mendicant fashion, he had heaped together the wealth of Croesus, would pride any more, for this, become him, as, in some sort, it becomes the man who has labored for his fortune, however small?  So, if a man tells me the sun is larger than the earth, have I any cause for pride in knowing it? or, if any multitude of men tell me any number of things, heaping all their wealth of knowledge upon me, have I any reason to be proud under the heap?  And is not nearly all the knowledge of which we boast in these days cast upon us in this dishonorable way; worked for by other men, proved by them, and then forced upon us, even against our wills, and beaten into us in our youth, before we have the wit even to know if it be good or not? (Mark the distinction between knowledge and thought.) Truly a noble possession to be proud of!  Be assured, there is no part of the furniture of a man’s mind which he has a right to exult in, but that which he has hewn and fashioned for himself.  He who has built himself a hut on a desert heath, and carved his bed, and table, and chair out of the nearest forest, may have some right to take pride in the appliances of his narrow chamber, as assuredly he will have joy in them.  But the man who has had a palace built, and adorned, and furnished for him, may, indeed, have many advantages above the other, but he has no reason to be proud of his upholsterer’s skill; and it is ten to one if he has half the joy in his couches of ivory that the other will have in his pallet of pine.

Sec.  XXXV.  And observe how we feel this, in the kind of respect we pay to such knowledge as we are indeed capable of estimating the value of.  When it is our own, and new to us, we cannot judge of it; but let it be another’s also, and long familiar to us, and see what value we set on it.  Consider how we regard a schoolboy, fresh from his term’s labor.  If he begin to display his newly acquired small knowledge to us, and plume himself thereupon, how soon do we silence him with contempt!  But it is not so if the schoolboy begins to feel or see anything.  In the strivings of his soul within him he is our equal; in his power of sight and thought he stands separate from us, and may be a greater than we.  We are ready to hear him forthwith.  “You saw that? you felt that?  No matter for your being a child; let us hear.”

Sec.  XXXVI.  Consider that every generation of men stands in this relation to its successors.  It is as the schoolboy:  the knowledge of which it is proudest will be as the alphabet to those who follow.  It had better make no noise about its knowledge; a time will come when its utmost, in that kind, will be food for scorn.  Poor fools! was that all they knew? and behold how proud they were!  But what we see and feel will never be mocked at.  All men will be thankful to us for telling them that.  “Indeed!” they will say, “they felt that in their day? saw that?  Would God we may be like them, before we go to the home where sight and thought are not!”

This unhappy and childish pride in knowledge, then, was the first constituent element of the Renaissance mind, and it was enough, of itself, to have cast it into swift decline:  but it was aided by another form of pride, which was above called the Pride of State; and which we have next to examine.

Sec.  XXXVII.  II.  PRIDE OF STATE.  It was noticed in the second volume of “Modern Painters,” , that the principle which had most power in retarding the modern school of portraiture was its constant expression of individual vanity and pride.  And the reader cannot fail to have observed that one of the readiest and commonest ways in which the painter ministers to this vanity, is by introducing the pedestal or shaft of a column, or some fragment, however simple, of Renaissance architecture, in the background of the portrait.  And this is not merely because such architecture is bolder or grander than, in general, that of the apartments of a private house.  No other architecture would produce the same effect in the same degree.  The richest Gothic, the most massive Norman, would not produce the same sense of exaltation as the simple and meagre lines of the Renaissance.

Sec.  XXXVIII.  And if we think over this matter a little, we shall soon feel that in those meagre lines there is indeed an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters; coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency.  All these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words.  For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the multitude.  Quaint fancy, rich ornament, bright color, something that shows a sympathy with men of ordinary minds and hearts; and this wrought out, at least in the Gothic, with a rudeness showing that the workman did not mind exposing his own ignorance if he could please others.  But the Renaissance is exactly the contrary of all this.  It is rigid, cold, inhuman; incapable of glowing, of stooping, of conceding for an instant.  Whatever excellence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply erudite; a kind which the architect well knows no common mind can taste.  He proclaims it to us aloud.  “You cannot feel my work unless you study Vitruvius.  I will give you no gay color, no pleasant sculpture, nothing to make you happy; for I am a learned man.  All the pleasure you can have in anything I do is in its proud breeding, its rigid formalism, its perfect finish, its cold tranquillity.  I do not work for the vulgar, only for the men of the academy and the court.”

Sec.  XXXIX.  And the instinct of the world felt this in a moment.  In the new precision and accurate law of the classical forms, they perceived something peculiarly adapted to the setting forth of state in an appalling manner:  Princes delighted in it, and courtiers.  The Gothic was good for God’s worship, but this was good for man’s worship.  The Gothic had fellowship with all hearts, and was universal, like nature:  it could frame a temple for the prayer of nations, or shrink into the poor man’s winding stair.  But here was an architecture that would not shrink, that had in it no submission, no mercy.  The proud princes and lords rejoiced in it.  It was full of insult to the poor in its every line.  It would not be built of the materials at the poor man’s hand; it would not roof itself with thatch or shingle, and black oak beams; it would not wall itself with rough stone or brick; it would not pierce itself with small windows where they were needed; it would not niche itself, wherever there was room for it, in the street corners.  It would be of hewn stone; it would have its windows and its doors, and its stairs and its pillars, in lordly order, and of stately size; it would have its wings and its corridors, and its halls and its gardens, as if all the earth were its own.  And the rugged cottages of the mountaineers, and the fantastic streets of the laboring burgher were to be thrust out of its way, as of a lower species.

Sec.  XL.  It is to be noted also, that it ministered as much to luxury as to pride.  Not to luxury of the eye, that is a holy luxury; Nature ministers to that in her painted meadows, and sculptured forests, and gilded heavens; the Gothic builder ministered to that in his twisted traceries, and deep-wrought foliage, and burning casements.  The dead Renaissance drew back into its earthliness, out of all that was warm and heavenly; back into its pride, out of all that was simple and kind; back into its stateliness, out of all that was impulsive, reverent, and gay.  But it understood the luxury of the body; the terraced and scented and grottoed garden, with its trickling fountains and slumbrous shades; the spacious hall and lengthened corridor for the summer heat; the well-closed windows, and perfect fittings and furniture, for defence against the cold; and the soft picture, and frescoed wall and roof, covered with the last lasciviousness of Paganism; ­this is understood and possessed to the full, and still possesses.  This is the kind of domestic architecture on which we pride ourselves, even to this day, as an infinite and honorable advance from the rough habits of our ancestors; from the time when the king’s floor was strewn with rushes, and the tapestries swayed before the searching wind in the baron’s hall.

Sec.  XLI.  Let us hear two stories of those rougher times.

At the debate of King Edwin with his courtiers and priests, whether he ought to receive the Gospel preached to him by Paulinus, one of his nobles spoke as follows: 

“The present life, O king! weighed with the time that is unknown, seems to me like this.  When you are sitting at a feast with your earls and thanes in winter time, and the fire is lighted, and the hall is warmed, and it rains and snows, and the storm is loud without, there comes a sparrow, and flies through the house.  It comes in at one door and goes out at the other.  While it is within, it is not touched by the winter’s storm; but it is but for the twinkling of an eye, for from winter it comes and to winter it returns.  So also this life of man endureth for a little space; what goes before or what follows after, we know not.  Wherefore, if this new lore bring anything more certain, it is fit that we should follow it."

That could not have happened in a Renaissance building.  The bird could not have dashed in from the cold into the heat, and from the heat back again into the storm.  It would have had to come up a flight of marble stairs, and through seven or eight antechambers; and so, if it had ever made its way into the presence chamber, out again through loggias and corridors innumerable.  And the truth which the bird brought with it, fresh from heaven, has, in like manner, to make its way to the Renaissance mind through many antechambers, hardly, and as a despised thing, if at all.

Sec.  XLII.  Hear another story of those early times.

The king of Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, at the siege of Asshur, or Arsur, gave audience to some émirs from Samaria and Naplous.  They found him seated on the ground on a sack of straw.  They expressing surprise, Godfrey answered them:  “May not the earth, out of which we came, and which is to be our dwelling after death, serve us for a seat during life?”

It is long since such a throne has been set in the reception chambers of Christendom, or such an answer heard from the lips of a king.

Thus the Renaissance spirit became base both in its abstinence and its indulgence.  Base in its abstinence; curtailing the bright and playful wealth of form and thought, which filled the architecture of the earlier ages with sources of delight for their hardy spirit, pure, simple, and yet rich as the fretwork of flowers and moss, watered by some strong and stainless mountain stream:  and base in its indulgence; as it granted to the body what it withdrew from the heart, and exhausted, in smoothing the pavement for the painless feet, and softening the pillow for the sluggish brain, the powers of art which once had hewn rough ladders into the clouds of heaven, and set up the stones by which they rested for houses of God.

Sec.  XLIII.  And just in proportion as this courtly sensuality lowered the real nobleness of the men whom birth or fortune raised above their fellows, rose their estimate of their own dignity, together with the insolence and unkindness of its expression, and the grossness of the flattery with which it was fed.  Pride is indeed the first and the last among the sins of men, and there is no age of the world in which it has not been unveiled in the power and prosperity of the wicked.  But there was never in any form of slavery, or of feudal supremacy, a forgetfulness so total of the common majesty of the human soul, and of the brotherly kindness due from man to man, as in the aristocratic follies in the Renaissance.  I have not space to follow out this most interesting and extensive subject; but here is a single and very curious example of the kind of flattery with which architectural teaching was mingled when addressed to the men of rank of the day.

Sec.  XLIV.  In St. Mark’s library there is a very curious Latin manuscript of the twenty-five books of Averulinus, a Florentine architect, upon the principles of his art.  The book was written in or about 1460, and translated into Latin, and richly illuminated for Corvinus, king of Hungary, about 1483.  I extract from the third book the following passage on the nature of stones.  “As there are three genera of men, ­that is to say, nobles, men of the middle classes, and rustics, ­so it appears that there are of stones.  For the marbles and common stones of which we have spoken above, set forth the rustics.  The porphyries and alabasters, and the other harder stones of mingled quality, represent the middle classes, if we are to deal in comparisons:  and by means of these the ancients adorned their temples with incrustations and ornaments in a magnificent manner.  And after these come the chalcedonies and sardonyxes, &c., which are so transparent that there can be seen no spot in them. Thus men endowed with nobility lead a life in which no spot can be found.”

Canute or Coeur de Lion (I name not Godfrey or St. Louis) would have dashed their sceptres against the lips of a man who should have dared to utter to them flattery such as this.  But in the fifteenth century it was rendered and accepted as a matter of course, and the tempers which delighted in it necessarily took pleasure also in every vulgar or false means, of taking worldly superiority.  And among such false means largeness of scale in the dwelling-house was of course one of the easiest and most direct.  All persons, however senseless or dull, could appreciate size:  it required some exertion of intelligence to enter into the spirit of the quaint carving of the Gothic times, but none to perceive that one heap of stones was higher than another. And therefore, while in the execution and manner of work the Renaissance builders zealously vindicated for themselves the attribute of cold and superior learning, they appealed for such approbation as they needed from the multitude, to the lowest possible standard of taste; and while the older workman lavished his labor on the minute niche and narrow casement, on the doorways no higher than the head, and the contracted angles of the turreted chamber, the Renaissance builder spared such cost and toil in his detail, that he might spend it in bringing larger stones from a distance; and restricted himself to rustication and five orders, that he might load the ground with colossal piers, and raise an ambitious barrenness of architecture, as inanimate as it was gigantic, above the feasts and follies of the powerful or the rich.  The Titanic insanity extended itself also into ecclesiastical design:  the principal church in Italy was built with little idea of any other admirableness than that which was to result from its being huge; and the religious impressions of those who enter it are to this day supposed to be dependent, in a great degree, on their discovering that they cannot span the thumbs of the statues which sustain the vessels for holy water.

Sec.  XLV.  It is easy to understand how an architecture which thus appealed not less to the lowest instincts of dulness than to the subtlest pride of learning, rapidly found acceptance with a large body of mankind; and how the spacious pomp of the new manner of design came to be eagerly adopted by the luxurious aristocracies, not only of Venice, but of the other countries of Christendom, now gradually gathering themselves into that insolent and festering isolation, against which the cry of the poor sounded hourly in more ominous unison, bursting at last into thunder (mark where, ­first among the planted walks and plashing fountains of the palace wherein the Renaissance luxury attained its utmost height in Europe, Versailles); that cry, mingling so much piteousness with its wrath and indignation, “Our soul is filled with the scornful reproof of the wealthy, and with the despitefulness of the proud.”

Sec.  XLVI.  But of all the evidence bearing upon this subject presented by the various arts of the fifteenth century, none is so interesting or so conclusive as that deduced from its tombs.  For, exactly in proportion as the pride of life became more insolent, the fear of death became more servile; and the difference in the manner in which the men of early and later days adorned the sepulchre, confesses a still greater difference in their manner of regarding death.  To those he came as the comforter and the friend, rest in his right hand, hope in his left; to these as the humiliator, the spoiler, and the avenger.  And, therefore, we find the early tombs at once simple and lovely in adornment, severe and solemn in their expression; confessing the power, and accepting the peace, of death, openly and joyfully; and in all their symbols marking that the hope of resurrection lay only in Christ’s righteousness; signed always with this simple utterance of the dead, “I will lay me down in peace, and take my rest; for it is thou, Lord, only that makest me dwell in safety.”  But the tombs of the later ages are a ghastly struggle of mean pride and miserable terror:  the one mustering the statues of the Virtues about the tomb, disguising the sarcophagus with delicate sculpture, polishing the false periods of the elaborate epitaph, and filling with strained animation the features of the portrait statue; and the other summoning underneath, out of the niche or from behind the curtain, the frowning skull, or scythed skeleton, or some other more terrible image of the enemy in whose defiance the whiteness of the sepulchre had been set to shine above the whiteness of the ashes.

Sec.  XLVII.  This change in the feeling with which sepulchral monuments were designed, from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries, has been common to the whole of Europe.  But, as Venice is in other respects the centre of the Renaissance system, so also she exhibits this change in the manner of the sepulchral monument under circumstances peculiarly calculated to teach us its true character.  For the severe guard which, in earlier times, she put upon every tendency to personal pomp and ambition, renders the tombs of her ancient monarchs as remarkable for modesty and simplicity as for their religious feeling; so that, in this respect, they are separated by a considerable interval from the more costly monuments erected at the same periods to the kings or nobles of other European states.  In later times, on the other hand, as the piety of the Venetians diminished, their pride overleaped all limits, and the tombs which in recent epochs, were erected for men who had lived only to impoverish or disgrace the state, were as much more magnificent than those contemporaneously erected for the nobles of Europe, as the monuments for the great Doges had been humbler.  When, in addition to this, we reflect that the art of sculpture, considered as expressive of emotion, was at a low ebb in Venice in the twelfth century, and that in the seventeenth she took the lead in Italy in luxurious work, we shall at once see the chain of examples through which the change of feeling is expressed, must present more remarkable extremes here than it can in any other city; extremes so startling that their impressiveness cannot be diminished, while their intelligibility is greatly increased, by the large number of intermediate types which have fortunately been preserved.

It would, however, too much weary the general reader if, without illustrations, I were to endeavor to lead him step by step through the aisles of St. John and Paul; and I shall therefore confine myself to a slight notice of those features in sepulchral architecture generally which are especially illustrative of the matter at present in hand, and point out the order in which, if possible, the traveller should visit the tombs in Venice, so as to be most deeply impressed with the true character of the lessons they convey.

Sec.  XLVIII.  I have not such an acquaintance with the modes of entombment or memorial in the earliest ages of Christianity as would justify me in making any general statement respecting them:  but it seems to me that the perfect type of a Christian tomb was not developed until toward the thirteenth century, sooner or later according to the civilization of each country; that perfect type consisting in the raised and perfectly visible sarcophagus of stone, bearing upon it a recumbent figure, and the whole covered by a canopy.  Before that type was entirely developed, and in the more ordinary tombs contemporary with it, we find the simple sarcophagus, often with only a rough block of stone for its lid, sometimes with a low-gabled lid like a cottage roof, derived from Egyptian forms, and bearing, either on the sides or the lid, at least a sculpture of the cross, and sometimes the name of the deceased, and date of erection of the tomb.  In more elaborate examples rich figure-sculpture is gradually introduced; and in the perfect period the sarcophagus, even when it does not bear any recumbent figure, has generally a rich sculpture on its sides representing an angel presenting the dead, in person and dress as he lived, to Christ or to the Madonna, with lateral figures, sometimes of saints, sometimes ­as in the tombs of the Dukes of Burgundy at Dijon ­of mourners; but in Venice almost always representing the Annunciation, the angel being placed at one angle of the sarcophagus, and the Madonna at the other.  The canopy, in a very simple foursquare form, or as an arch over a recess, is added above the sarcophagus, long before the life-size recumbent figure appears resting upon it.  By the time that the sculptors had acquired skill enough to give much expression to this figure, the canopy attains an exquisite symmetry and richness; and, in the most elaborate examples, is surmounted by a statue, generally small, representing the dead person in the full strength and pride of life, while the recumbent figure shows him as he lay in death.  And, at this point, the perfect type of the Gothic tomb is reached.

Sec.  XLIX.  Of the simple sarcophagus tomb there are many exquisite examples both at Venice and Verona; the most interesting in Venice are those which are set in the recesses of the rude brick front of the Church of St. John and Paul, ornamented only, for the most part, with two crosses set in circles, and the legend with the name of the dead, and an “Orate pro anima” in another circle in the centre.  And in this we may note one great proof of superiority in Italian over English tombs; the latter being often enriched with quatrefoils, small shafts, and arches, and other ordinary architectural decorations, which destroy their seriousness and solemnity, render them little more than ornamental, and have no religious meaning whatever; while the Italian sarcophagi are kept massive, smooth, and gloomy, ­heavy-lidded dungeons of stone, like rock-tombs, ­but bearing on their surface, sculptured with tender and narrow lines, the emblem of the cross, not presumptuously nor proudly, but dimly graven upon their granite, like the hope which the human heart holds, but hardly perceives in its heaviness.

Sec.  L. Among the tombs in front of the Church of St. John and Paul there is one which is peculiarly illustrative of the simplicity of these earlier ages.  It is on the left of the entrance, a massy sarcophagus with low horns as of an altar, placed in a rude recess of the outside wall, shattered and worn, and here and there entangled among wild grass and weeds.  Yet it is the tomb of two Doges, Jacopo and Lorenzo Tiepolo, by one of whom nearly the whole ground was given for the erection of the noble church in front of which his unprotected tomb is wasting away.  The sarcophagus bears an inscription in the centre, describing the acts of the Doges, of which the letters show that it was added a considerable period after the erection of the tomb:  the original legend is still left in other letters on its base, to this effect,

  “Lord James, died 1251.  Lord Laurence, died 1288.”

At the two corners of the sarcophagus are two angels bearing censers; and on its lid two birds, with crosses like crests upon their heads.  For the sake of the traveller in Venice the reader will, I think, pardon me the momentary irrelevancy of telling the meaning of these symbols.

Sec.  LI.  The foundation of the church of St. John and Paul was laid by the Dominicans about 1234, under the immediate protection of the Senate and the Doge Giacomo Tiepolo, accorded to them in consequence of a miraculous vision appearing to the Doge; of which the following account is given in popular tradition: 

“In the year 1226, the Doge Giacomo Tiepolo dreamed a dream; and in his dream he saw the little oratory of the Dominicans, and, behold, the ground all around it (now occupied by the church) was covered with roses of the color of vermilion, and the air was filled with their fragrance.  And in the midst of the roses, there were seen flying to and fro a crowd of white doves, with golden crosses upon their heads.  And while the Doge looked, and wondered, behold, two angels descended from heaven with golden censers, and passing through the oratory, and forth among the flowers, they filled the place with the smoke of their incense.  Then the Doge heard suddenly a clear and loud voice which proclaimed, ‘This is the place that I have chosen for my preachers;’ and having heard it, straightway he awoke and went to the Senate, and declared to them the vision.  Then the Senate decreed that forty paces of ground should be given to enlarge the monastery; and the Doge Tiepolo himself made a still larger grant afterwards.”

There is nothing miraculous in the occurrence of such a dream as this to the devout Doge; and the fact, of which there is no doubt, that the greater part of the land on which the church stands was given by him, is partly a confirmation of the story.  But, whether the sculptures on the tomb were records of the vision, or the vision a monkish invention from the sculptures on the tomb, the reader will not, I believe, look upon its doves and crosses, or rudely carved angels, any more with disdain; knowing how, in one way or another, they were connected with a point of deep religious belief.

Sec.  LII.  Towards the beginning of the fourteenth century, in Venice, the recumbent figure begins to appear on the sarcophagus, the first dated example being also one of the most beautiful; the statue of the prophet Simeon, sculptured upon the tomb which was to receive his relics in the church dedicated to him under the name of San Simeone Grande.  So soon as the figure appears, the sarcophagus becomes much more richly sculptured, but always with definite religious purpose.  It is usually divided into two panels, which are filled with small bas-reliefs of the acts or martyrdom of the patron saints of the deceased:  between them, in the centre, Christ, or the Virgin and Child, are richly enthroned, under a curtained canopy; and the two figures representing the Annunciation are almost always at the angles; the promise of the Birth of Christ being taken as at once the ground and the type of the promise of eternal life to all men.

Sec.  LIII.  These figures are always in Venice most rudely chiselled; the progress of figure sculpture being there comparatively tardy.  At Verona, where the great Pisan school had strong influence, the monumental sculpture is immeasurably finer; and, so early as about the year 1335, the consummate form of the Gothic tomb occurs in the monument of Can Grande della Scala at Verona.  It is set over the portal of the chapel anciently belonging to the family.  The sarcophagus is sculptured with shallow bas-reliefs, representing (which is rare in the tombs with which I am acquainted in Italy, unless they are those of saints) the principal achievements of the warrior’s life, especially the siege of Vicenza and battle of Placenza; these sculptures, however, form little more than a chased and roughened groundwork for the fully relieved statues representing the Annunciation, projecting boldly from the front of the sarcophagus.  Above, the Lord of Verona is laid in his long robe of civil dignity, wearing the simple bonnet, consisting merely of a fillet bound round the brow, knotted and falling on the shoulder.  He is laid as asleep; his arms crossed upon his body, and his sword by his side.  Above him, a bold arched canopy is sustained by two projecting shafts, and on the pinnacle of its roof is the statue of the knight on his war-horse; his helmet, dragon-winged and crested with the dog’s head, tossed back behind his shoulders, and the broad and blazoned drapery floating back from his horse’s breast, ­so truly drawn by the old workman from the life, that it seems to wave in the wind, and the knight’s spear to shake, and his marble horse to be evermore quickening its pace, and starting into heavier and hastier charge, as the silver clouds float past behind it in the sky.

Sec.  LIV.  Now observe, in this tomb, as much concession is made to the pride of man as may ever consist with honor, discretion, or dignity.  I do not enter into any question respecting the character of Can Grande, though there can be little doubt that he was one of the best among the nobles of his time; but that is not to our purpose.  It is not the question whether his wars were just, or his greatness honorably achieved; but whether, supposing them to have been so, these facts are well and gracefully told upon his tomb.  And I believe there can be no hesitation in the admission of its perfect feeling and truth.  Though beautiful, the tomb is so little conspicuous or intrusive, that it serves only to decorate the portal of the little chapel, and is hardly regarded by the traveller as he enters.  When it is examined, the history of the acts of the dead is found subdued into dim and minute ornament upon his coffin; and the principal aim of the monument is to direct the thoughts to his image as he lies in death, and to the expression of his hope of resurrection; while, seen as by the memory far away, diminished in the brightness of the sky, there is set the likeness of his armed youth, stately, as it stood of old, in the front of battle, and meet to be thus recorded for us, that we may now be able to remember the dignity of the frame, of which those who once looked upon it hardly remembered that it was dust.

Sec.  LV.  This, I repeat, is as much as may ever be granted, but this ought always to be granted, to the honor and the affection of men.  The tomb which stands beside that of Can Grande, nearest it in the little field of sleep, already shows the traces of erring ambition.  It is the tomb of Mastino the Second, in whose reign began the decline of his family.  It is altogether exquisite as a work of art; and the evidence of a less wise or noble feeling in its design is found only in this, that the image of a virtue, Fortitude, as belonging to the dead, is placed on the extremity of the sarcophagus, opposite to the Crucifixion.  But for this slight circumstance, of which the significance will only be appreciated as we examine the series of later monuments, the composition of this monument of Can Mastino would have been as perfect as its decoration is refined.  It consists, like that of Can Grande, of the raised sarcophagus, bearing the recumbent statue, protected by a noble foursquare canopy, sculptured with ancient Scripture history.  On one side of the sarcophagus is Christ enthroned, with Can Mastino kneeling before Him; on the other, Christ is represented in the mystical form, half-rising from the tomb, meant, I believe, to be at once typical of His passion and resurrection.  The lateral panels are occupied by statues of saints.  At one extremity of the sarcophagus is the Crucifixion; at the other, a noble statue of Fortitude, with a lion’s skin thrown over her shoulders, its head forming a shield upon her breast, her flowing hair bound with a narrow fillet, and a three-edged sword in her gauntleted right hand, drawn back sternly behind her thigh, while, in her left, she bears high the shield of the Scalas.

Sec.  LVI.  Close to this monument is another, the stateliest and most sumptuous of the three; it first arrests the eye of the stranger, and long detains it, ­a many-pinnacled pile surrounded by niches with statues of the warrior saints.

It is beautiful, for it still belongs to the noble time, the latter part of the fourteenth century; but its work is coarser than that of the other, and its pride may well prepare us to learn that it was built for himself, in his own lifetime, by the man whose statue crowns it, Can Signorio della Scala.  Now observe, for this is infinitely significant.  Can Mastino II. was feeble and wicked, and began the ruin of his house; his sarcophagus is the first which bears upon it the image of a virtue, but he lays claim only to Fortitude.  Can Signorio was twice a fratricide, the last time when he lay upon his death-bed:  his tomb bears upon its gables the images of six virtues, ­Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, and (I believe) Justice and Fortitude.

Sec.  LVII.  Let us now return to Venice, where, in the second chapel counting from right to left, at the west end of the Church of the Frari, there is a very early fourteenth, or perhaps late thirteenth, century tomb, another exquisite example of the perfect Gothic form.  It is a knight’s; but there is no inscription upon it, and his name is unknown.  It consists of a sarcophagus, supported on bold brackets against the chapel wall, bearing the recumbent figure, protected by a simple canopy in the form of a pointed arch, pinnacled by the knight’s crest; beneath which the shadowy space is painted dark blue, and strewn with stars.  The statue itself is rudely carved; but its lines, as seen from the intended distance, are both tender and masterly.  The knight is laid in his mail, only the hands and face being bare.  The hauberk and helmet are of chain-mail, the armor for the limbs of jointed steel; a tunic, fitting close to the breast, and marking the noble swell of it by two narrow embroidered lines, is worn over the mail; his dagger is at his right side; his long cross-belted sword, not seen by the spectator from below, at his left.  His feet rest on a hound (the hound being his crest), which looks up towards its master.  In general, in tombs of this kind, the face of the statue is slightly turned towards the spectator; in this monument, on the contrary, it is turned away from him, towards the depth of the arch:  for there, just above the warrior’s breast, is carved a small image of St. Joseph bearing the infant Christ, who looks down upon the resting figure; and to this image its countenance is turned.  The appearance of the entire tomb is as if the warrior had seen the vision of Christ in his dying moments, and had fallen back peacefully upon his pillow, with his eyes still turned to it, and his hands clasped in prayer.

Sec.  LVIII.  On the opposite side of this chapel is another very lovely tomb, to Duccio degli Alberti, a Florentine ambassador at Venice; noticeable chiefly as being the first in Venice on which any images of the Virtues appear.  We shall return to it presently, but some account must first be given of the more important among the other tombs in Venice belonging to the perfect period.  Of these, by far the most interesting, though not the most elaborate, is that of the great Doge Francesco Dandolo, whose ashes, it might have been thought, were honorable enough to have been permitted to rest undisturbed in the chapter-house of the Frari, where they were first laid.  But, as if there were not room enough, nor waste houses enough in the desolate city to receive a few convent papers, the monks, wanting an “archivio,” have separated the tomb into three pieces:  the canopy, a simple arch sustained on brackets, still remains on the blank walls of the desecrated chamber; the sarcophagus has been transported to a kind of museum of antiquities, established in what was once the cloister of Santa Maria della Salute; and the painting which filled the lunette behind it is hung far out of sight, at one end of the sacristy of the same church.  The sarcophagus is completely charged with bas-reliefs:  at its two extremities are the types of St. Mark and St. John; in front, a noble sculpture of the death of the Virgin; at the angles, angels holding vases.  The whole space is occupied by the sculpture; there are no spiral shafts or panelled divisions; only a basic plinth below, and crowning plinth above, the sculpture being raised from a deep concave field between the two, but, in order to give piquancy and picturesqueness to the mass of figures, two small trees are introduced at the head and foot of the Madonna’s couch, an oak and a stone pine.

Sec.  LIX.  It was said above, in speaking of the frequent disputes of the Venetians with the Pontifical power, which in their early days they had so strenuously supported, that “the humiliation of Francesco Dandolo blotted out the shame of Barbarossa.”  It is indeed well that the two events should be remembered together.  By the help of the Venetians, Alexander III. was enabled, in the twelfth century, to put his foot upon the neck of the emperor Barbarossa, quoting the words of the Psalm, “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder.”  A hundred and fifty years later, the Venetian ambassador, Francesco Dandolo, unable to obtain even an audience from the Pope, Clement V., to whom he had been sent to pray for a removal of the sentence of excommunication pronounced against the republic, concealed himself (according to the common tradition) beneath the Pontiff’s dining-table; and thence coming out as he sat down to meat, embraced his feet, and obtained, by tearful entreaties, the removal of the terrible sentence.

I say, “according to the common tradition;” for there are some doubts cast upon the story by its supplement.  Most of the Venetian historians assert that Francesco Dandolo’s surname of “Dog” was given him first on this occasion, in insult, by the cardinals; and that the Venetians, in remembrance of the grace which his humiliation had won for them, made it a title of honor to him and to his race.  It has, however, been proved that the surname was borne by the ancestors of Francesco Dandolo long before; and the falsity of this seal of the legend renders also its circumstances doubtful.  But the main fact of grievous humiliation having been undergone, admits of no dispute; the existence of such a tradition at all is in itself a proof of its truth; it was not one likely to be either invented or received without foundation:  and it will be well, therefore, that the reader should remember, in connection with the treatment of Barbarossa at the door of the Church of St. Mark’s, that in the Vatican, one hundred and fifty years later, a Venetian noble, a future Doge, submitted to a degradation, of which the current report among his people was, that he had crept on his hands and knees from beneath the Pontiff’s table to his feet, and had been spurned as a “dog” by the cardinals present.

Sec.  LX.  There are two principal conclusions to be drawn from this:  the obvious one respecting the insolence of the Papal dominion in the thirteenth century; the second, that there were probably most deep piety and humility in the character of the man who could submit to this insolence for the sake of a benefit to his country.  Probably no motive would have been strong enough to obtain such a sacrifice from most men, however unselfish; but it was, without doubt, made easier to Dandolo by his profound reverence for the Pontifical office; a reverence which, however we may now esteem those who claimed it, could not but have been felt by nearly all good and faithful men at the time of which we are speaking.  This is the main point which I wish the reader to remember as we look at his tomb, this, and the result of it, ­that, some years afterwards, when he was seated on the throne which his piety had saved, “there were sixty princes’ ambassadors in Venice at the same time, requesting the judgment of the Senate on matters of various concernment, so great was the fame of the uncorrupted justice of the Fathers."

Observe, there are no virtues on this tomb.  Nothing but religious history or symbols; the Death of the Virgin in front, and the types of St. Mark and St. John at the extremities.

Sec.  LXI.  Of the tomb of the Doge Andrea Dandolo, in St. Mark’s, I have spoken before.  It is one of the first in Venice which presents, in a canopy, the Pisan idea of angels withdrawing curtains, as of a couch, to look down upon the dead.  The sarcophagus is richly decorated with flower-work; the usual figures of the Annunciation are at the sides; an enthroned Madonna in the centre; and two bas-reliefs, one of the martyrdom of the Doge’s patron saint, St. Andrew, occupy the intermediate spaces.  All these tombs have been richly colored; the hair of the angels has here been gilded, their wings bedropped with silver, and their garments covered with the most exquisite arabesques.  This tomb, and that of St. Isidore in another chapel of St. Mark’s, which was begun by this very Doge, Andrea Dandolo, and completed after his death in 1354, are both nearly alike in their treatment, and are, on the whole, the best existing examples of Venetian monumental sculpture.

Sec.  LXII.  Of much ruder workmanship, though still most precious, and singularly interesting from its quaintness, is a sarcophagus in the northernmost chapel, beside the choir of St. John and Paul, charged with two bas-reliefs and many figures, but which bears no inscription.  It has, however, a shield with three dolphins on its brackets; and as at the feet of the Madonna in its centre there is a small kneeling figure of a Doge, we know it to be the tomb of the Doge Giovanni Dolfino, who came to the throne in 1356.

He was chosen Doge while, as provveditore, he was in Treviso, defending the city against the King of Hungary.  The Venetians sent to the besiegers, praying that their newly elected Doge might be permitted to pass the Hungarian lines.  Their request was refused, the Hungarians exulting that they held the Doge of Venice prisoner in Treviso.  But Dolfino, with a body of two hundred horse, cut his way through their lines by night, and reached Mestre (Malghera) in safety, where he was met by the Senate.  His bravery could not avert the misfortunes which were accumulating on the republic.  The Hungarian war was ignominiously terminated by the surrender of Dalmatia:  the Doge’s heart was broken, his eyesight failed him, and he died of the plague four years after he had ascended the throne.

Sec.  LXIII.  It is perhaps on this account, perhaps in consequence of later injuries, that the tomb has neither effigy nor inscription:  that it has been subjected to some violence is evident from the dentil which once crowned its leaf-cornice being now broken away, showing the whole front.  But, fortunately, the sculpture of the sarcophagus itself is little injured.

There are two saints, male and female, at its angles, each in a little niche; a Christ, enthroned in the centre, the Doge and Dogaressa kneeling at his feet; in the two intermediate panels, on one side the Epiphany, on the other the Death of the Virgin; the whole supported, as well as crowned, by an elaborate leaf-plinth.  The figures under the niches are rudely cut, and of little interest.  Not so the central group.  Instead of a niche, the Christ is seated under a square tent, or tabernacle, formed by curtains running on rods; the idea, of course, as usual, borrowed from the Pisan one, but here ingeniously applied.  The curtains are opened in front, showing those at the back of the tent, behind the seated figure; the perspective of the two retiring sides being very tolerably suggested.  Two angels, of half the size of the seated figure, thrust back the near curtains, and look up reverently to the Christ; while again, at their feet, about one third of their size, and half-sheltered, as it seems, by their garments, are the two kneeling figures of the Doge and Dogaressa, though so small and carefully cut, full of life.  The Christ raising one hand as to bless, and holding a book upright and open on the knees, does not look either towards them or to the angels, but forward; and there is a very noticeable effort to represent Divine abstraction in the countenance:  the idea of the three magnitudes of spiritual being, ­the God, the Angel, and the Man, ­is also to be observed, aided as it is by the complete subjection of the angelic power to the Divine; for the angels are in attitudes of the most lowly watchfulness of the face of Christ, and appear unconscious of the presence of the human beings who are nestled in the folds of their garments.

Sec.  LXIV.  With this interesting but modest tomb of one of the kings of Venice, it is desirable to compare that of one of her senators, of exactly the same date, which is raised against the western wall of the Frari, at the end of the north aisle.  It bears the following remarkable inscription: 

 “ANNO MCCCLX. prima die Julii Sepultura .  Domini .  Simonii Dandolo .
   amador . de .  Justisia . e . desiroso . de . acrese . el . ben .
   chomum.”

The “Amador de Justitia” has perhaps some reference to Simon Dandolo’s having been one of the Giunta who condemned the Doge Faliero.  The sarcophagus is decorated merely by the Annunciation group, and an enthroned Madonna with a curtain behind her throne, sustained by four tiny angels, who look over it as they hold it up; but the workmanship of the figures is more than usually beautiful.

Sec.  LXV.  Seven years later, a very noble monument was placed on the north side of the choir of St. John and Paul, to the Doge Marco Cornaro, chiefly, with respect to our present subject, noticeable for the absence of religious imagery from the sarcophagus, which is decorated with roses only; three very beautiful statues of the Madonna and two saints are, however, set in the canopy above.  Opposite this tomb, though about fifteen years later in date, is the richest monument of the Gothic period in Venice; that of the Doge Michele Morosini, who died in 1382.  It consists of a highly florid canopy, ­an arch crowned by a gable, with pinnacles at the flanks, boldly crocketed, and with a huge finial at the top representing St. Michael, ­a medallion of Christ set in the gable; under the arch, a mosaic, representing the Madonna presenting the Doge to Christ upon the cross; beneath, as usual, the sarcophagus, with a most noble recumbent figure of the Doge, his face meagre and severe, and sharp in its lines, but exquisite in the form of its small and princely features.  The sarcophagus is adorned with elaborate wrinkled leafage, projecting in front of it into seven brackets, from which the statues are broken away; but by which, for there can be no doubt that these last statues represented the theological and cardinal Virtues, we must for a moment pause.

Sec.  LXVI.  It was noticed above, that the tomb of the Florentine ambassador, Duccio, was the first in Venice which presented images of the Virtues.  Its small lateral statues of Justice and Temperance are exquisitely beautiful, and were, I have no doubt, executed by a Florentine sculptor; the whole range of artistical power and religious feeling being, in Florence, full half a century in advance of that of Venice.  But this is the first truly Venetian tomb which has the Virtues; and it becomes of importance, therefore, to know what was the character of Morosini.

The reader must recollect, that I dated the commencement of the fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, considering that no state could be held as in decline, which numbered such a man amongst its citizens.  Carlo Zeno was a candidate for the Ducal bonnet together with Michael Morosini; and Morosini was chosen.  It might be anticipated, therefore, that there was something more than usually admirable or illustrious in his character.  Yet it is difficult to arrive at a just estimate of it, as the reader will at once understand by comparing the following statements: 

   Sec.  LXV.  “To him (Andrea Contarini) succeeded Morosini, at the
   age of seventy-four years; a most learned and prudent man, who also
   reformed several laws.” ­Sansovino, Vite de’ Principi.

2.  “It was generally believed that, if his reign had been longer, he would have dignified the state by many noble laws and institutes; but by so much as his reign was full of hope, by as much was it short in duration, for he died when he had been at the head of the republic but four months.” ­Sabellico, lib. viii.

   3.  “He was allowed but a short time to enjoy this high dignity, which
   he had so well deserved by his rare virtues, for God called him to
   Himself on the 15th of October.” ­Muratori, Annali de’ Italia.

4.  “Two candidates presented themselves; one was Zeno, the other that Michael Morosini who, during the war, had tripled his fortune by his speculations.  The suffrages of the electors fell upon him, and he was proclaimed Doge on the 10th of June.” ­Daru, Histoire de Venise, lib. x.

5.  “The choice of the electors was directed to Michele Morosini, a noble of illustrious birth, derived from a stock which, coeval with the republic itself, had produced the conqueror of Tyre, given a queen to Hungary, and more than one Doge to Venice.  The brilliancy of this descent was tarnished in the present chief representative of the family by the most base and grovelling avarice; for at that moment, in the recent war, at which all other Venetians were devoting their whole fortunes to the service of the state, Morosini sought in the distresses of his country an opening for his own private enrichment, and employed his ducats, not in the assistance of the national wants, but in speculating upon houses which were brought to market at a price far beneath their real value, and which, upon the return of peace, insured the purchaser a fourfold profit.  ’What matters the fall of Venice to me, so as I fall not together with her?’ was his selfish and sordid reply to some one who expressed surprise at the transaction.” ­Sketches of Venetian History.  Murray, 1831.

Sec.  LXVIII.  The writer of the unpretending little history from which the last quotation is taken has not given his authority for this statement, and I could not find it, but believed, from the general accuracy of the book, that some authority might exist better than Daru’s.  Under these circumstances, wishing if possible to ascertain the truth, and to clear the character of this great Doge from the accusation, if it proved groundless, I wrote to the Count Carlo Morosini, his descendant, and one of the few remaining representatives of the ancient noblesse of Venice; one, also, by whom his great ancestral name is revered, and in whom it is exalted.  His answer appears to me altogether conclusive as to the utter fallacy of the reports of Daru and the English history.  I have placed his letter in the close of this volume (Appendix 6), in order that the reader may himself be the judge upon this point; and I should not have alluded to Daru’s report, except for the purpose of contradicting it, but that it still appears to me impossible that any modern historian should have gratuitously invented the whole story, and that, therefore, there must have been a trace in the documents which Daru himself possessed, of some scandal of this kind raised by Morosini’s enemies, perhaps at the very time of the disputed election with Carlo Zeno.  The occurrence of the Virtues upon his tomb, for the first time in Venetian monumental work, and so richly and conspicuously placed, may partly have been in public contradiction of such a floating rumor.  But the face of the statue is a more explicit contradiction still; it is resolute, thoughtful, serene, and full of beauty; and we must, therefore, for once, allow the somewhat boastful introduction of the Virtues to have been perfectly just:  though the whole tomb is most notable, as furnishing not only the exact intermediate condition in style between the pure Gothic and its final Renaissance corruption, but, at the same time, the exactly intermediate condition of feeling between the pure calmness of early Christianity, and the boastful pomp of the Renaissance faithlessness; for here we have still the religious humility remaining in the mosaic of the canopy, which shows the Doge kneeling before the cross, while yet this tendency to self-trust is shown in the surrounding of the coffin by the Virtues.

Sec.  LXIX.  The next tomb by the side of which they appear is that of Jacopo Cavalli, in the same chapel of St. John and Paul which contains the tomb of the Doge Delfin.  It is peculiarly rich in religious imagery, adorned by boldly cut types of the four evangelists, and of two saints, while, on projecting brackets in front of it, stood three statues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, now lost, but drawn in Zanotto’s work.  It is all rich in detail, and its sculptor has been proud of it, thus recording his name below the epitaph: 

  “QST OPERA DINTALGIO E FATTO IN PIERA,
   UNVENICIAN LAFE CHANOME POLO,
   NATO DI JACHOMEL CHATAIAPIERA.”

   This work of sculpture is done in stone;
   A Venetian did it, named Paul,
   Son of Jachomel the stone-cutter.

Jacopo Cavalli died in 1384.  He was a bold and active Veronese soldier, did the state much service, was therefore ennobled by it, and became the founder of the house of the Cavalli; but I find no especial reason for the images of the Virtues, especially that of Charity, appearing at his tomb, unless it be this:  that at the siege of Feltre, in the war against Leopold of Austria, he refused to assault the city, because the senate would not grant his soldiers the pillage of the town.  The feet of the recumbent figure, which is in full armor, rest on a dog, and its head on two lions; and these animals (neither of which form any part of the knight’s bearings) are said by Zanotto to be intended to symbolize his bravery and fidelity.  If, however, the lions are meant to set forth courage, it is a pity they should have been represented as howling.

Sec.  LXX.  We must next pause for an instant beside the tomb of Michael Steno, now in the northern aisle of St. John and Paul, having been removed there from the destroyed church of the Servi:  first, to note its remarkable return to the early simplicity, the sarcophagus being decorated only with two crosses in quatrefoils, though it is of the fifteenth century, Steno dying in 1413; and, in the second place, to observe the peculiarity of the epitaph, which eulogises Steno as having been “amator justitie, pacis, et ubertatis,” “a lover of justice, peace, and plenty.”  In the epitaphs of this period, the virtues which are made most account of in public men are those which were most useful to their country.  We have already seen one example in the epitaph on Simon Dandolo; and similar expressions occur constantly in laudatory mentions of their later Doges by the Venetian writers.  Thus Sansovino of Marco Cornaro, “Era savio huomo, éloquente, e amava molto la pace e l’ abbondanza della città;” and of Tomaso Mocenigo, “Huomo oltre modo desideroso della pace.”

Of the tomb of this last-named Doge mention has before been made.  Here, as in Morosini’s, the images of the Virtues have no ironical power, although their great conspicuousness marks the increase of the boastful feeling in the treatment of monuments.  For the rest, this tomb is the last in Venice which can be considered as belonging to the Gothic period.  Its mouldings are already rudely classical, and it has meaningless figures in Roman armor at the angles; but its tabernacle above is still Gothic, and the recumbent figure is very beautiful.  It was carved by two Florentine sculptors in 1423.

Sec.  LXXI.  Tomaso Mocenigo was succeeded by the renowned Doge, Francesco Foscari, under whom, it will be remembered, the last additions were made to the Gothic Ducal Palace; additions which, in form only, not in spirit, corresponded to the older portions; since, during his reign, the transition took place which permits us no longer to consider the Venetian architecture as Gothic at all.  He died in 1457, and his tomb is the first important example of Renaissance art.

Not, however, a good characteristic example.  It is remarkable chiefly as introducing all the faults of the Renaissance at an early period, when its merits, such as they are, were yet undeveloped.  Its claim to be rated as a classical composition is altogether destroyed by the remnants of Gothic feeling which cling to it here and there in their last forms of degradation; and of which, now that we find them thus corrupted, the sooner we are rid the better.  Thus the sarcophagus is supported by a species of trefoil arches; the bases of the shafts have still their spurs; and the whole tomb is covered by a pediment, with crockets and a pinnacle.  We shall find that the perfect Renaissance is at least pure in its insipidity, and subtle in its vice; but this monument is remarkable as showing the refuse of one style encumbering the embryo of another, and all principles of life entangled either in the swaddling clothes or the shroud.

Sec.  LXXII.  With respect to our present purpose, however, it is a monument of enormous importance.  We have to trace, be it remembered, the pride of state in its gradual intrusion upon the sepulchre; and the consequent and correlative vanishing of the expressions of religious feeling and heavenly hope, together with the more and more arrogant setting forth of the virtues of the dead.  Now this tomb is the largest and most costly we have yet seen; but its means of religious expression are limited to a single statue of Christ, small and used merely as a pinnacle at the top.  The rest of the composition is as curious as it is vulgar.  The conceit, so often noticed as having been borrowed from the Pisan school, of angels withdrawing the curtains of the couch to look down upon the dead, was brought forward with increasing prominence by every succeeding sculptor; but, as we draw nearer to the Renaissance period, we find that the angels become of less importance, and the curtains of more.  With the Pisans, the curtains are introduced as a motive for the angels; with the Renaissance sculptors, the angels are introduced merely as a motive for the curtains, which become every day more huge and elaborate.  In the monument of Mocenigo, they have already expanded into a tent, with a pole in the centre of it:  and in that of Foscari, for the first time, the angels are absent altogether; while the curtains are arranged in the form of an enormous French tent-bed, and are sustained at the flanks by two diminutive figures in Roman armor; substituted for the angels, merely that the sculptor might show his knowledge of classical costume.  And now observe how often a fault in feeling induces also a fault in style.  In the old tombs, the angels used to stand on or by the side of the sarcophagus; but their places are here to be occupied by the Virtues, and therefore, to sustain the diminutive Roman figures at the necessary height, each has a whole Corinthian pillar to himself, a pillar whose shaft is eleven feet high, and some three or four feet round:  and because this was not high enough, it is put on a pedestal four feet and a half high; and has a spurred base besides of its own, a tall capital, then a huge bracket above the capital, and then another pedestal above the bracket, and on the top of all the diminutive figure who has charge of the curtains.

Sec.  LXXIII.  Under the canopy, thus arranged, is placed the sarcophagus with its recumbent figure.  The statues of the Virgin and the saints have disappeared from it.  In their stead, its panels are filled with half-length figures of Faith, Hope, and Charity; while Temperance and Fortitude are at the Doge’s feet, Justice and Prudence at his head, figures now the size of life, yet nevertheless recognizable only by their attributes:  for, except that Hope raises her eyes, there is no difference in the character or expression of any of their faces, ­they are nothing more than handsome Venetian women, in rather full and courtly dresses, and tolerably well thrown into postures for effect from below.  Fortitude could not of course be placed in a graceful one without some sacrifice of her character, but that was of no consequence in the eyes of the sculptors of this period, so she leans back languidly, and nearly overthrows her own column; while Temperance, and Justice opposite to her, as neither the left hand of the one nor the right hand of the other could be seen from below, have been left with one hand each.

Sec.  LXXIV.  Still these figures, coarse and feelingless as they are, have been worked with care, because the principal effect of the tomb depends on them.  But the effigy of the Doge, of which nothing but the side is visible, has been utterly neglected; and the ingenuity of the sculptor is not so great, at the best, as that he can afford to be slovenly.  There is, indeed, nothing in the history of Foscari which would lead us to expect anything particularly noble in his face; but I trust, nevertheless, it has been misrepresented by this despicable carver; for no words are strong enough to express the baseness of the portraiture.  A huge, gross, bony clown’s face, with the peculiar sodden and sensual cunning in it which is seen so often in the countenances of the worst Romanist priest; a face part of iron and part of clay, with the immobility of the one, and the foulness of the other, double chinned, blunt-mouthed, bony-cheeked, with its brows drawn down into meagre lines and wrinkles over the eyelids; the face of a man incapable either of joy or sorrow, unless such as may be caused by the indulgence of passion, or the mortification of pride.  Even had he been such a one, a noble workman would not have written it so legibly on his tomb; and I believe it to be the image of the carver’s own mind that is there hewn in the marble, not that of the Doge Foscari.  For the same mind is visible enough throughout, the traces of it mingled with those of the evil taste of the whole time and people.  There is not anything so small but it is shown in some portion of its treatment; for instance, in the placing of the shields at the back of the great curtain.  In earlier times, the shield, as we have seen, was represented as merely suspended against the tomb by a thong, or if sustained in any other manner, still its form was simple and undisguised.  Men in those days used their shields in war, and therefore there was no need to add dignity to their form by external ornament.  That which, through day after day of mortal danger, had borne back from them the waves of battle, could neither be degraded by simplicity, nor exalted by decoration.  By its rude leathern thong it seemed to be fastened to their tombs, and the shield of the mighty was not cast away, though capable of defending its master no more.

Sec.  LXXV.  It was otherwise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  The changed system of warfare was rapidly doing away with the practical service of the shield; and the chiefs who directed the battle from a distance, or who passed the greater part of their lives in the council-chamber, soon came to regard the shield as nothing more than a field for their armorial bearings.  It then became a principal object of their Pride of State to increase the conspicuousness of these marks of family distinction by surrounding them with various and fantastic ornament, generally scroll or flower work, which of course deprived the shield of all appearance of being intended for a soldier’s use.  Thus the shield of the Foscari is introduced in two ways.  On the sarcophagus, the bearings are three times repeated, enclosed in circular disks, which are sustained each by a couple of naked infants.  Above the canopy, two shields of the usual form are set in the centre of circles filled by a radiating ornament of shell flutings, which give them the effect of ventilators; and their circumference is farther adorned by gilt rays, undulating to represent a glory.

Sec.  LXXVI.  We now approach that period of the early Renaissance which was noticed in the preceding chapter as being at first a very visible improvement on the corrupted Gothic.  The tombs executed during the period of the Byzantine Renaissance exhibit, in the first place, a consummate skill in handling the chisel, perfect science of drawing and anatomy, high appreciation of good classical models, and a grace of composition and delicacy of ornament derived, I believe, principally from the great Florentine sculptors.  But, together with this science, they exhibit also, for a short time, some return to the early religious feeling, forming a school of sculpture which corresponds to that of the school of the Bellini in painting; and the only wonder is that there should not have been more workmen in the fifteenth century doing in marble what Perugino, Francia, and Bellini did on canvas.  There are, indeed, some few, as I have just said, in whom the good and pure temper shows itself:  but the sculptor was necessarily led sooner than the painter to an exclusive study of classical models, utterly adverse to the Christian imagination; and he was also deprived of the great purifying and sacred element of color, besides having much more of merely mechanical and therefore degrading labor to go through in the realization of his thought.  Hence I do not know any example in sculpture at this period, at least in Venice, which has not conspicuous faults (not faults of imperfection, as in early sculpture, but of purpose and sentiment), staining such beauties as it may possess; and the whole school soon falls away, and merges into vain pomp and meagre metaphor.

Sec.  LXXVII.  The most celebrated monument of this period is that to the Doge Andrea Vendramin, in the Church of St. John and Paul, sculptured about 1480, and before alluded to in the first chapter of the first volume.  It has attracted public admiration, partly by its costliness, partly by the delicacy and precision of its chiselling; being otherwise a very base and unworthy example of the school, and showing neither invention nor feeling.  It has the Virtues, as usual, dressed like heathen goddesses, and totally devoid of expression, though graceful and well studied merely as female figures.  The rest of its sculpture is all of the same kind; perfect in workmanship, and devoid of thought.  Its dragons are covered with marvellous scales, but have no terror nor sting in them; its birds are perfect in plumage, but have no song in them; its children lovely of limb, but have no childishness in them.

Sec.  LXXVIII.  Of far other workmanship are the tombs of Pietro and Giovanni Mocenigo, in St. John and Paul, and of Pietro Bernardo in the Frari; in all which the details are as full of exquisite fancy, as they are perfect in execution; and in the two former, and several others of similar feeling, the old religious symbols return; the Madonna is again seen enthroned under the canopy, and the sarcophagus is decorated with legends of the saints.  But the fatal errors of sentiment are, nevertheless, always traceable.  In the first place, the sculptor is always seen to be intent upon the exhibition of his skill, more than on producing any effect on the spectator’s mind; elaborate backgrounds of landscape, with tricks of perspective, imitations of trees, clouds, and water, and various other unnecessary adjuncts, merely to show how marble could be subdued; together with useless under-cutting, and over-finish in subordinate parts, continually exhibiting the same cold vanity and unexcited precision of mechanism.  In the second place, the figures have all the peculiar tendency to posture-making, which, exhibiting itself first painfully in Perugino, rapidly destroyed the veracity of composition in all art.  By posture-making I mean, in general, that action of figures which results from the painter’s considering, in the first place, not how, under the circumstances, they would actually have walked, or stood, or looked, but how they may most gracefully and harmoniously walk or stand.  In the hands of a great man, posture, like everything else, becomes noble, even when over-studied, as with Michael Angelo, who was, perhaps, more than any other, the cause of the mischief; but, with inferior men, this habit of composing attitudes ends necessarily in utter lifelessness and abortion.  Giotto was, perhaps, of all painters, the most free from the infection of the poison, always conceiving an incident naturally, and drawing it unaffectedly; and the absence of posture-making in the works of the Pre-Raphaelites, as opposed to the Attitudinarianism of the modern school, has been both one of their principal virtues, and of the principal causes of outcry against them.

Sec.  LXXIX.  But the most significant change in the treatment of these tombs, with respect to our immediate object, is in the form of the sarcophagus.  It was above noted, that, exactly in proportion to the degree of the pride of life expressed in any monument, would be also the fear of death; and therefore, as these tombs increase in splendor, in size, and beauty of workmanship, we perceive a gradual desire to take away from the definite character of the sarcophagus.  In the earliest times, as we have seen, it was a gloomy mass of stone; gradually it became charged with religious sculpture; but never with the slightest desire to disguise its form, until towards the middle of the fifteenth century.  It then becomes enriched with flower-work and hidden by the Virtues; and, finally, losing its foursquare form, it is modelled on graceful types of ancient vases, made as little like a coffin as possible, and refined away in various elegancies, till it becomes, at last, a mere pedestal or stage for the portrait statue.  This statue, in the meantime, has been gradually coming back to life, through a curious series of transitions.  The Vendramin monument is one of the last which shows, or pretends to show, the recumbent figure laid in death.  A few years later, this idea became disagreeable to polite minds; and, lo! the figures which before had been laid at rest upon the tomb pillow, raised themselves on their elbows, and began to look round them.  The soul of the sixteenth century dared not contemplate its body in death.

Sec.  LXXX.  The reader cannot but remember many instances of this form of monument, England being peculiarly rich in examples of them; although, with her, tomb sculpture, after the fourteenth century, is altogether imitative, and in no degree indicative of the temper of the people.  It was from Italy that the authority for the change was derived; and in Italy only, therefore, that it is truly correspondent to the change in the national mind.  There are many monuments in Venice of this semi-animate type, most of them carefully sculptured, and some very admirable as portraits, and for the casting of the drapery, especially those in the Church of San Salvador; but I shall only direct the reader to one, that of Jacopo Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, in the Church of the Frari; notable not only as a very skilful piece of sculpture, but for the epitaph, singularly characteristic of the period, and confirmatory of all that I have alleged against it: 

 “James Pesaro, Bishop of Paphos, who conquered the Turks in war,
   himself in peace, transported from a noble family among the Venetians
   to a nobler among the angels, laid here, expects the noblest crown,
   which the just Judge shall give to him in that day.  He lived the
   years of Plato.  He died 24th March, 1547."

The mingled classicism and carnal pride of this epitaph surely need no comment.  The crown is expected as a right from the justice of the judge, and the nobility of the Venetian family is only a little lower than that of the angels.  The quaint childishness of the “Vixit annos Platonicos” is also very notable.

Sec.  LXXXI.  The statue, however, did not long remain in this partially recumbent attitude.  Even the expression of peace became painful to the frivolous and thoughtless Italians, and they required the portraiture to be rendered in a manner that should induce no memory of death.  The statue rose up, and presented itself in front of the tomb, like an actor upon a stage, surrounded now not merely, or not at all, by the Virtues, but by allegorical figures of Fame and Victory, by genii and muses, by personifications of humbled kingdoms and adoring nations, and by every circumstance of pomp, and symbol of adulation, that flattery could suggest, or insolence could claim.

Sec.  LXXXII.  As of the intermediate monumental type, so also of this, the last and most gross, there are unfortunately many examples in our own country; but the most wonderful, by far, are still at Venice.  I shall, however, particularize only two; the first, that of the Doge John Pesaro, in the Frari.  It is to be observed that we have passed over a considerable interval of time; we are now in the latter half of the seventeenth century; the progress of corruption has in the meantime been incessant, and sculpture has here lost its taste and learning as well as its feeling.  The monument is a huge accumulation of theatrical scenery in marble:  four colossal negro caryatides, grinning and horrible, with faces of black marble and white eyes, sustain the first story of it; above this, two monsters, long-necked, half dog and half dragon, sustain an ornamental sarcophagus, on the top of which the full-length statue of the Doge in robes of state stands forward with its arms expanded, like an actor courting applause, under a huge canopy of metal, like the roof of a bed, painted crimson and gold; on each side of him are sitting figures of genii, and unintelligible personifications gesticulating in Roman armor; below, between the negro caryatides, are two ghastly figures in bronze, half corpse, half skeleton, carrying tablets on which is written the eulogium:  but in large letters graven in gold, the following words are the first and last that strike the eye; the first two phrases, one on each side, on tablets in the lower story, the last under the portrait statue above: 

VIXIT ANNOS LXX.  DEVIXIT ANNO MDCLIX. 
“HIC REVIXIT ANNO MDCLXIX.”

We have here, at last, the horrible images of death in violent contrast with the defiant monument, which pretends to bring the resurrection down to earth, “Hic revixit;” and it seems impossible for false taste and base feeling to sink lower.  Yet even this monument is surpassed by one in St. John and Paul.

Sec.  LXXXIII.  But before we pass to this, the last with which I shall burden the reader’s attention, let us for a moment, and that we may feel the contrast more forcibly, return to a tomb of the early times.

In a dark niche in the outer wall of the outer corridor of St. Mark’s ­not even in the church, observe, but in the atrium or porch of it, and on the north side of the church, ­is a solid sarcophagus of white marble, raised only about two feet from the ground on four stunted square pillars.  Its lid is a mere slab of stone; on its extremities are sculptured two crosses; in front of it are two rows of rude figures, the uppermost representing Christ with the Apostles:  the lower row is of six figures only, alternately male and female, holding up their hands in the usual attitude of benediction; the sixth is smaller than the rest, and the midmost of the other five has a glory round its head.  I cannot tell the meaning of these figures, but between them are suspended censers attached to crosses; a most beautiful symbolic expression of Christ’s mediatorial function.  The whole is surrounded by a rude wreath of vine leaves, proceeding out of the foot of a cross.

On the bar of marble which separates the two rows of figures are inscribed these words: 

  “Here lies the Lord Marin Morosini, Duke.”

It is the tomb of the Doge Marino Morosini, who reigned from 1249 to 1252.

Sec.  LXXXIV.  From before this rude and solemn sepulchre let us pass to the southern aisle of the church of St. John and Paul; and there, towering from the pavement to the vaulting of the church, behold a mass of marble, sixty or seventy feet in height, of mingled yellow and white, the yellow carved into the form of an enormous curtain, with ropes, fringes, and tassels, sustained by cherubs; in front of which, in the now usual stage attitudes, advance the statues of the Doge Bertuccio Valier, his son the Doge Silvester Falier, and his son’s wife, Elizabeth.  The statues of the Doges, though mean and Polonius-like, are partly redeemed by the Ducal robes; but that of the Dogaressa is a consummation of grossness, vanity, and ugliness, ­the figure of a large and wrinkled woman, with elaborate curls in stiff projection round her face, covered from her shoulders to her feet with ruffs, furs, lace, jewels, and embroidery.  Beneath and around are scattered Virtues, Victories, Fames, genii, ­the entire company of the monumental stage assembled, as before a drop scene, ­executed by various sculptors, and deserving attentive study as exhibiting every condition of false taste and feeble conception.  The Victory in the centre is peculiarly interesting; the lion by which she is accompanied, springing on a dragon, has been intended to look terrible, but the incapable sculptor could not conceive any form of dreadfulness, could not even make the lion look angry.  It looks only lachrymose; and its lifted forepaws, there being no spring nor motion in its body, give it the appearance of a dog begging.  The inscriptions under the two principal statues are as follows: 

“Bertucius Valier, Duke,
Great in wisdom and eloquence,
Greater in his Hellespontic victory,
Greatest in the Prince his son. 
Died in the year 1658.”

“Elisabeth Quirina,
The wife of Silvester,
Distinguished by Roman virtue,
By Venetian piety,
And by the Ducal crown,
Died 1708.”

The writers of this age were generally anxious to make the world aware that they understood the degrees of comparison, and a large number of epitaphs are principally constructed with this object (compare, in the Latin, that of the Bishop of Paphos, given above):  but the latter of these epitaphs is also interesting from its mention, in an age now altogether given up to the pursuit of worldly honor, of that “Venetian piety” which once truly distinguished the city from all others; and of which some form and shadow, remaining still, served to point an epitaph, and to feed more cunningly and speciously the pride which could not be satiated with the sumptuousness of the sepulchre.

Sec.  LXXXV.  Thus far, then, of the second element of the Renaissance spirit, the Pride of State; nor need we go farther to learn the reason of the fall of Venice.  She was already likened in her thoughts, and was therefore to be likened in her ruin, to the Virgin of Babylon.  The Pride of State and the Pride of Knowledge were no new passions:  the sentence against them had gone forth from everlasting.  “Thou saidst, I shall be a lady for ever; so that thou didst not lay these things to thine heart ... Thy wisdom and thy knowledge, it hath perverted thee; and thou hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else beside me.  Therefore shall evil come upon thee ...; thy merchants from thy youth, they shall wander every one to his quarter; none shall save thee."

Sec.  LXXXVI.  III.  PRIDE OF SYSTEM.  I might have illustrated these evil principles from a thousand other sources, but I have not time to pursue the subject farther, and must pass to the third element above named, the Pride of System.  It need not detain us so long as either of the others, for it is at once more palpable and less dangerous.  The manner in which the pride of the fifteenth century corrupted the sources of knowledge, and diminished the majesty, while it multiplied the trappings, of state, is in general little observed; but the reader is probably already well and sufficiently aware of the curious tendency to formulization and system which, under the name of philosophy, encumbered the minds of the Renaissance schoolmen.  As it was above stated, grammar became the first of sciences; and whatever subject had to be treated, the first aim of the philosopher was to subject its principles to a code of laws, in the observation of which the merit of the speaker, thinker, or worker, in or on that subject, was thereafter to consist; so that the whole mind of the world was occupied by the exclusive study of Restraints.  The sound of the forging of fetters was heard from sea to sea.  The doctors of all the arts and sciences set themselves daily to the invention of new varieties of cages and manacles; they themselves wore, instead of gowns, a chain mail, whose purpose was not so much to avert the weapon of the adversary as to restrain the motions of the wearer; and all the acts, thoughts, and workings of mankind, ­poetry, painting, architecture, and philosophy, ­were reduced by them merely to so many different forms of fetter-dance.

Sec.  LXXXVII.  Now, I am very sure that no reader who has given any attention to the former portions of this work, or the tendency of what else I have written, more especially the last chapter of the “Seven Lamps,” will suppose me to underrate the importance, or dispute the authority, of law.  It has been necessary for me to allege these again and again, nor can they ever be too often or too energetically alleged, against the vast masses of men who now disturb or retard the advance of civilization; heady and high-minded, despisers of discipline, and refusers of correction.  But law, so far as it can be reduced to form and system, and is not written upon the heart, ­as it is, in a Divine loyalty, upon the hearts of the great hierarchies who serve and wait about the throne of the Eternal Lawgiver, ­this lower and formally expressible law has, I say, two objects.  It is either for the definition and restraint of sin, or the guidance of simplicity; it either explains, forbids, and punishes wickedness, or it guides the movements and actions both of lifeless things and of the more simple and untaught among responsible agents.  And so long, therefore, as sin and foolishness are in the world, so long it will be necessary for men to submit themselves painfully to this lower law, in proportion to their need of being corrected, and to the degree of childishness or simplicity by which they approach more nearly to the condition of the unthinking and inanimate things which are governed by law altogether; yet yielding, in the manner of their submission to it, a singular lesson to the pride of man, ­being obedient more perfectly in proportion to their greatness. But, so far as men become good and wise, and rise above the state of children, so far they become emancipated from this written law, and invested with the perfect freedom which consists in the fulness and joyfulness of compliance with a higher and unwritten law; a law so universal, so subtle, so glorious, that nothing but the heart can keep it.

Sec.  LXXXVIII.  Now pride opposes itself to the observance of this Divine law in two opposite ways:  either by brute resistance, which is the way of the rabble and its leaders, denying or defying law altogether; or by formal compliance, which is the way of the Pharisee, exalting himself while he pretends to obedience, and making void the infinite and spiritual commandment by the finite and lettered commandment.  And it is easy to know which law we are obeying:  for any law which we magnify and keep through pride, is always the law of the letter; but that which we love and keep through humility, is the law of the Spirit:  And the letter killeth, but the Spirit giveth life.

Sec.  LXXXIX.  In the appliance of this universal principle to what we have at present in hand, it is to be noted, that all written or writable law respecting the arts is for the childish and ignorant:  that in the beginning of teaching, it is possible to say that this or that must or must not be done; and laws of color and shade may be taught, as laws of harmony are to the young scholar in music.  But the moment a man begins to be anything deserving the name of an artist, all this teachable law has become a matter of course with him; and if, thenceforth, he boast himself anywise in the law, or pretend that he lives and works by it, it is a sure sign that he is merely tithing cummin, and that there is no true art nor religion in him.  For the true artist has that inspiration in him which is above all law, or rather, which is continually working out such magnificent and perfect obedience to supreme law, as can in no wise be rendered by line and rule.  There are more laws perceived and fulfilled in the single stroke of a great workman, than could be written in a volume.  His science is inexpressibly subtle, directly taught him by his Maker, not in any wise communicable or imitable. Neither can any written or definitely observable laws enable us to do any great thing.  It is possible, by measuring and administering quantities of color, to paint a room wall so that it shall not hurt the eye; but there are no laws by observing which we can become Titians.  It is possible so to measure and administer syllables, as to construct harmonious verse; but there are no laws by which we can write Iliads.  Out of the poem or the picture, once produced, men may elicit laws by the volume, and study them with advantage, to the better understanding of the existing poem or picture; but no more write or paint another, than by discovering laws of vegetation they can make a tree to grow.  And therefore, wheresoever we find the system and formality of rules much dwelt upon, and spoken of as anything else than a help for children, there we may be sure that noble art is not even understood, far less reached.  And thus it was with all the common and public mind in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  The greater men, indeed, broke through the thorn hedges; and, though much time was lost by the learned among them in writing Latin verses and anagrams, and arranging the framework of quaint sonnets and dexterous syllogisms, still they tore their way through the sapless thicket by force of intellect or of piety; for it was not possible that, either in literature or in painting, rules could be received by any strong mind, so as materially to interfere with its originality:  and the crabbed discipline and exact scholarship became an advantage to the men who could pass through and despise them; so that in spite of the rules of the drama we had Shakspeare, and in spite of the rules of art we had Tintoret, ­both of them, to this day, doing perpetual violence to the vulgar scholarship and dim-eyed proprieties of the multitude.

Sec.  XC.  But in architecture it was not so; for that was the art of the multitude, and was affected by all their errors; and the great men who entered its field, like Michael Angelo, found expression for all the best part of their minds in sculpture, and made the architecture merely its shell.  So the simpletons and sophists had their way with it:  and the reader can have no conception of the inanitiés and puerilities of the writers, who, with the help of Vitruvius, re-established its “five orders,” determined the proportions of each, and gave the various recipes for sublimity and beauty, which have been thenceforward followed to this day, but which may, I believe, in this age of perfect machinery, be followed out still farther.  If, indeed, there are only five perfect forms of columns and architraves, and there be a fixed proportion to each, it is certainly possible, with a little ingenuity, so to regulate a stonecutting machine, as that it shall furnish pillars and friezes to the size ordered, of any of the five orders, on the most perfect Greek models, in any quantity; an epitome, also, of Vitruvius, may be made so simple, as to enable any bricklayer to set them up at their proper distances, and we may dispense with our architects altogether.

Sec.  XCI.  But if this be not so, and there be any truth in the faint persuasion which still lurks in men’s minds that architecture is an art, and that it requires some gleam of intellect to practise it, then let the whole system of the orders and their proportions be cast out and trampled down as the most vain, barbarous, and paltry deception that was ever stamped on human prejudice; and let us understand this plain truth, common to all work of man, that, if it be good work, it is not a copy, nor anything done by rule, but a freshly and divinely imagined thing.  Five orders!  There is not a side chapel in any Gothic cathedral but it has fifty orders, the worst of them better than the best of the Greek ones, and all new; and a single inventive human soul could create a thousand orders in an hour. And this would have been discovered even in the worst times, but that, as I said, the greatest men of the age found expression for their invention in the other arts, and the best of those who devoted themselves to architecture were in great part occupied in adapting the construction of buildings to new necessities, such as those developed by the invention of gunpowder (introducing a totally new and most interesting science of fortification, which directed the ingenuity of Sanmicheli and many others from its proper channel), and found interest of a meaner kind in the difficulties of reconciling the obsolete architectural laws they had consented to revive, and the forms of Roman architecture which they agreed to copy, with the requirements of the daily life of the sixteenth century.

Sec.  XCII.  These, then, were the three principal directions in which the Renaissance pride manifested itself, and its impulses were rendered still more fatal by the entrance of another element, inevitably associated with pride.  For, as it is written, “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool,” so also it is written, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God;” and the self-adulation which influenced not less the learning of the age than its luxury, led gradually to the forgetfulness of all things but self, and to an infidelity only the more fatal because it still retained the form and language of faith.

Sec.  XCIII.  IV.  INFIDELITY.  In noticing the more prominent forms in which this faithlessness manifested itself, it is necessary to distinguish justly between that which was the consequence of respect for Paganism, and that which followed from the corruption of Catholicism.  For as the Roman architecture is not to be made answerable for the primal corruption of the Gothic, so neither is the Roman philosophy to be made answerable for the primal corruption of Christianity.  Year after year, as the history of the life of Christ sank back into the depths of time, and became obscured by the misty atmosphere of the history of the world, ­as intermediate actions and incidents multiplied in number, and countless changes in men’s modes of life, and tones of thought, rendered it more difficult for them to imagine the facts of distant time, ­it became daily, almost hourly, a greater effort for the faithful heart to apprehend the entire veracity and vitality of the story of its Redeemer; and more easy for the thoughtless and remiss to deceive themselves as to the true character of the belief they had been taught to profess.  And this must have been the case, had the pastors of the Church never failed in their watchfulness, and the Church itself never erred in its practice or doctrine.  But when every year that removed the truths of the Gospel into deeper distance, added to them also some false or foolish tradition; when wilful distortion was added to natural obscurity, and the dimness of memory was disguised by the fruitfulness of fiction; when, moreover, the enormous temporal power granted to the clergy attracted into their ranks multitudes of men who, but for such temptation, would not have pretended to the Christian name, so that grievous wolves entered in among them, not sparing the flock; and when, by the machinations of such men, and the remissness of others, the form and administrations of Church doctrine and discipline had become little more than a means of aggrandizing the power of the priesthood, it was impossible any longer for men of thoughtfulness or piety to remain in an unquestioning serenity of faith.  The Church had become so mingled with the world that its witness could no longer be received; and the professing members of it, who were placed in circumstances such as to enable them to become aware of its corruptions, and whom their interest or their simplicity did not bribe or beguile into silence, gradually separated themselves into two vast multitudes of adverse energy, one tending to Reformation, and the other to Infidelity.

Sec.  XCIV.  Of these, the last stood, as it were, apart, to watch the course of the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism; a struggle which, however necessary, was attended with infinite calamity to the Church.  For, in the first place, the Protestant movement was, in reality, not reformation but réanimation.  It poured new life into the Church, but it did not form or define her anew.  In some sort it rather broke down her hedges, so that all they who passed by might pluck off her grapes.  The reformers speedily found that the enemy was never far behind the sower of good seed; that an evil spirit might enter the ranks of reformation as well as those of resistance; and that though the deadly blight might be checked amidst the wheat, there was no hope of ever ridding the wheat itself from the tares.  New temptations were invented by Satan wherewith to oppose the revived strength of Christianity:  as the Romanist, confiding in his human teachers, had ceased to try whether they were teachers sent from God, so the Protestant, confiding in the teaching of the Spirit, believed every spirit, and did not try the spirits whether they were of God.  And a thousand enthusiasms and hérésies speedily obscured the faith and divided the force of the Reformation.

Sec.  XCV.  But the main evils rose out of the antagonism of the two great parties; primarily, in the mere fact of the existence of an antagonism.  To the eyes of the unbeliever the Church of Christ, for the first time since its foundation, bore the aspect of a house divided against itself.  Not that many forms of schism had not before arisen in it; but either they had been obscure and silent, hidden among the shadows of the Alps and the marshes of the Rhine; or they had been outbreaks of visible and unmistakable error, cast off by the Church, rootless, and speedily withering away, while, with much that was erring and criminal, she still retained within her the pillar and ground of the truth.  But here was at last a schism in which truth and authority were at issue.  The body that was cast off withered away no longer.  It stretched out its boughs to the sea and its branches to the river, and it was the ancient trunk that gave signs of decrepitude.  On one side stood the reanimated faith, in its right hand the book open, and its left hand lifted up to heaven, appealing for its proof to the Word of the Testimony and the power of the Holy Ghost.  On the other stood, or seemed to stand, all beloved custom and believed tradition; all that for fifteen hundred years had been closest to the hearts of men, or most precious for their help.  Long-trusted legend; long-reverenced power; long-practised discipline; faiths that had ruled the destiny, and sealed the departure, of souls that could not be told or numbered for multitude; prayers, that from the lips of the fathers to those of the children had distilled like sweet waterfalls, sounding through the silence of ages, breaking themselves into heavenly dew to return upon the pastures of the wilderness; hopes, that had set the face as a flint in the torture, and the sword as a flame in the battle, that had pointed the purposes and ministered the strength of life, brightened the last glances and shaped the last syllables of death; charities, that had bound together the brotherhoods of the mountain and the desert, and had woven chains of pitying or aspiring communion between this world and the unfathomable beneath and above; and, more than these, the spirits of all the innumerable, undoubting, dead, beckoning to the one way by which they had been content to follow the things that belonged unto their peace; ­these all stood on the other side:  and the choice must have been a bitter one, even at the best; but it was rendered tenfold more bitter by the natural, but most sinful animosity of the two divisions of the Church against each other.

Sec.  XCVI.  On one side this animosity was, of course, inevitable.  The Romanist party, though still including many Christian men, necessarily included, also, all the worst of those who called themselves Christians.  In the fact of its refusing correction, it stood confessed as the Church of the unholy; and, while it still counted among its adherents many of the simple and believing, ­men unacquainted with the corruption of the body to which they belonged, or incapable of accepting any form of doctrine but that which they had been taught from their youth, ­it gathered together with them whatever was carnal and sensual in priesthood or in people, all the lovers of power in the one, and of ease in the other.  And the rage of these men was, of course, unlimited against those who either disputed their authority, reprehended their manner of life, or cast suspicion upon the popular methods of lulling the conscience in the lifetime, or purchasing salvation on the death-bed.

Sec.  XCVII.  Besides this, the reassertion and defence of various tenets which before had been little more than floating errors in the popular mind, but which, definitely attacked by Protestantism, it became necessary to fasten down with a band of iron and brass, gave a form at once more rigid, and less rational, to the whole body of Romanist Divinity.  Multitudes of minds which in other ages might have brought honor and strength to the Church, preaching the more vital truths which it still retained, were now occupied in pleading for arraigned falsehoods, or magnifying disused frivolities; and it can hardly be doubted by any candid observer, that the nascent or latent errors which God pardoned in times of ignorance, became unpardonable when they were formally defined and defended; that fallacies which were forgiven to the enthusiasm of a multitude, were avenged upon the stubbornness of a Council; that, above all, the great invention of the age, which rendered God’s word accessible to every man, left all sins against its light incapable of excuse or expiation; and that from the moment when Rome set herself in direct opposition to the Bible, the judgment was pronounced upon her, which made her the scorn and the prey of her own children, and cast her down from the throne where she had magnified herself against heaven, so low, that at last the unimaginable scene of the Bethlehem humiliation was mocked in the temples of Christianity.  Judea had seen her God laid in the manger of the beasts of burden; it was for Christendom to stable the beasts of burden by the altar of her God.

Sec.  XCVIII.  Nor, on the other hand, was the opposition of Protestantism to the Papacy less injurious to itself.  That opposition was, for the most part, intemperate, undistinguishing, and incautious.  It could indeed hardly be otherwise.  Fresh bleeding from the sword of Rome, and still trembling at her anathema, the reformed churches were little likely to remember any of her benefits, or to regard any of her teaching.  Forced by the Romanist contumely into habits of irreverence, by the Romanist fallacies into habits of disbelief, the self-trusting, rashly-reasoning spirit gained ground among them daily.  Sect branched out of sect, presumption rose over presumption; the miracles of the early Church were denied and its martyrs forgotten, though their power and palm were claimed by the members of every persecuted sect; pride, malice, wrath, love of change, masked themselves under the thirst for truth, and mingled with the just resentment of deception, so that it became impossible even for the best and truest men to know the plague of their own hearts; while avarice and impiety openly transformed reformation into robbery, and reproof into sacrilege.  Ignorance could as easily lead the foes of the Church, as lull her slumber; men who would once have been the unquestioning recipients, were now the shameless inventors of absurd or perilous superstitions; they who were of the temper that walketh in darkness, gained little by having discovered their guides to be blind; and the simplicity of the faith, ill understood and contumaciously alleged, became an excuse for the rejection of the highest arts and most tried wisdom of mankind:  while the learned infidel, standing aloof, drew his own conclusions, both from the rancor of the antagonists, and from their errors; believed each in all that he alleged against the other; and smiled with superior humanity, as he watched the winds of the Alps drift the ashes of Jerome, and the dust of England drink the blood of King Charles.

Sec.  XCIX.  Now all this evil was, of course, entirely independent of the renewal of the study of Pagan writers.  But that renewal found the faith of Christendom already weakened and divided; and therefore it was itself productive of an effect tenfold greater than could have been apprehended from it at another time.  It acted first, as before noticed, in leading the attention of all men to words instead of things; for it was discovered that the language of the middle ages had been corrupt, and the primal object of every scholar became now to purify his style.  To this study of words, that of forms being added, both as of matters of the first importance, half the intellect of the age was at once absorbed in the base sciences of grammar, logic, and rhetoric; studies utterly unworthy of the serious labor of men, and necessarily rendering those employed upon them incapable of high thoughts or noble emotion.  Of the debasing tendency of philology, no proof is needed beyond once reading a grammarian’s notes on a great poet:  logic is unnecessary for men who can reason; and about as useful to those who cannot, as a machine for forcing one foot in due succession before the other would be to a man who could not walk:  while the study of rhetoric is exclusively one for men who desire to deceive or be deceived; he who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue, or, if he fear it, it is because the base rhetoric of dishonesty keeps the truth from being heard.

Sec.  C. The study of these sciences, therefore, naturally made men shallow and dishonest in general; but it had a peculiarly fatal effect with respect to religion, in the view which men took of the Bible.  Christ’s teaching was discovered not to be rhetorical, St. Paul’s preaching not to be logical, and the Greek of the New Testament not to be grammatical.  The stern truth, the profound pathos, the impatient period, leaping from point to point and leaving the intervals for the hearer to fill, the comparatively Hebraized and unelaborate idiom, had little in them of attraction for the students of phrase and syllogism; and the chief knowledge of the age became one of the chief stumbling-blocks to its religion.

Sec.  CI.  But it was not the grammarian and logician alone who was thus retarded or perverted; in them there had been small loss.  The men who could truly appreciate the higher excellences of the classics were carried away by a current of enthusiasm which withdrew them from every other study.  Christianity was still professed as a matter of form, but neither the Bible nor the writings of the Fathers had time left for their perusal, still less heart left for their acceptance.  The human mind is not capable of more than a certain amount of admiration or reverence, and that which was given to Horace was withdrawn from David.  Religion is, of all subjects, that which will least endure a second place in the heart or thoughts, and a languid and occasional study of it was sure to lead to error or infidelity.  On the other hand, what was heartily admired and unceasingly contemplated was soon brought nigh to being believed; and the systems of Pagan mythology began gradually to assume the places in the human mind from which the unwatched Christianity was wasting.  Men did not indeed openly sacrifice to Jupiter, or build silver shrines for Diana, but the ideas of Paganism nevertheless became thoroughly vital and present with them at all times; and it did not matter in the least, as far as respected the power of true religion, whether the Pagan image was believed in or not, so long as it entirely occupied the thoughts.  The scholar of the sixteenth century, if he saw the lightning shining from the east unto the west, thought forthwith of Jupiter, not of the coming of the Son of Man; if he saw the moon walking in brightness, he thought of Diana, not of the throne which was to be established for ever as a faithful witness in heaven; and though his heart was but secretly enticed, yet thus he denied the God that is above.

And, indeed, this double creed, of Christianity confessed and Paganism beloved, was worse than Paganism itself, inasmuch as it refused effective and practical belief altogether.  It would have been better to have worshipped Diana and Jupiter at once, than to have gone on through the whole of life naming one God, imagining another, and dreading none.  Better, a thousandfold, to have been “a Pagan suckled in some creed outworn,” than to have stood by the great sea of Eternity and seen no God walking on its waves, no heavenly world on its horizon.

Sec.  CII.  This fatal result of an enthusiasm for classical literature was hastened and heightened by the misdirection of the powers of art.  The imagination of the age was actively set to realize these objects of Pagan belief; and all the most exalted faculties of man, which, up to that period, had been employed in the service of Faith, were now transferred to the service of Fiction.  The invention which had formerly been both sanctified and strengthened by laboring under the command of settled intention, and on the ground of assured belief, had now the reins laid upon its neck by passion, and all ground of fact cut from beneath its feet; and the imagination which formerly had helped men to apprehend the truth, now tempted them to believe a falsehood.  The faculties themselves wasted away in their own treason; one by one they fell in the potter’s field; and the Raphael who seemed sent and inspired from heaven that he might paint Apostles and Prophets, sank at once into powerlessness at the feet of Apollo and the Muses.

Sec.  CIII.  But this was not all.  The habit of using the greatest gifts of imagination upon fictitious subjects, of course destroyed the honor and value of the same imagination used in the cause of truth.  Exactly in the proportion in which Jupiters and Mercuries were embodied and believed, in that proportion Virgins and Angels were disembodied and disbelieved.  The images summoned by art began gradually to assume one average value in the spectator’s mind; and incidents from the Iliad and from the Exodus to come within the same degrees of credibility.  And, farther, while the powers of the imagination were becoming daily more and more languid, because unsupported by faith, the manual skill and science of the artist were continually on the increase.  When these had reached a certain point, they began to be the principal things considered in the picture, and its story or scene to be thought of only as a theme for their manifestation.  Observe the difference.  In old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting.  The distinction is enormous, the difference incalculable as irreconcilable.  And thus, the more skilful the artist, the less his subject was regarded; and the hearts of men hardened as their handling softened, until they reached a point when sacred, profane, or sensual subjects were employed, with absolute indifference, for the display of color and execution; and gradually the mind of Europe congealed into that state of utter apathy, ­inconceivable, unless it had been witnessed, and unpardonable, unless by us, who have been infected by it, ­which permits us to place the Madonna and the Aphrodite side by side in our galleries, and to pass, with the same unmoved inquiry into the manner of their handling, from a Bacchanal to a Nativity.

Now all this evil, observe, would have been merely the necessary and natural operation of an enthusiasm for the classics, and of a delight in the mere science of the artist, on the most virtuous mind.  But this operation took place upon minds enervated by luxury, and which were tempted, at the very same period, to forgetfulness or denial of all religious principle by their own basest instincts.  The faith which had been undermined by the genius of Pagans, was overthrown by the crimes of Christians; and the ruin which was begun by scholarship, was completed by sensuality.  The characters of the heathen divinities were as suitable to the manners of the time as their forms were agreeable to its taste; and Paganism again became, in effect, the religion of Europe.  That is to say, the civilized world is at this moment, collectively, just as Pagan as it was in the second century; a small body of believers being now, as they were then, representative of the Church of Christ in the midst of the faithless:  but there is just this difference, and this very fatal one, between the second and nineteenth centuries, that the Pagans are nominally and fashionably Christians, and that there is every conceivable variety and shade of belief between the two; so that not only is it most difficult theoretically to mark the point where hesitating trust and failing practice change into definite infidelity, but it has become a point of politeness not to inquire too deeply into our neighbor’s religious opinions; and, so that no one be offended by violent breach of external forms, to waive any close examination into the tenets of faith.  The fact is, we distrust each other and ourselves so much, that we dare not press this matter; we know that if, on any occasion of general intercourse, we turn to our next neighbor, and put to him some searching or testing question, we shall, in nine cases out of ten, discover him to be only a Christian in his own way, and as far as he thinks proper, and that he doubts of many things which we ourselves do not believe strongly enough to hear doubted without danger.  What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity; and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men’s evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.  And under this shelter of charity, humility, and faintheartedness, the world, unquestioned by others or by itself, mingles with and overwhelms the small body of Christians, legislates for them, moralizes for them, reasons for them; and, though itself of course greatly and beneficently influenced by the association, and held much in check by its pretence to Christianity, yet undermines, in nearly the same degree, the sincerity and practical power of Christianity itself, until at last, in the very institutions of which the administration may be considered as the principal test of the genuineness of national religion, those devoted to education, the Pagan system is completely triumphant; and the entire body of the so-called Christian world has established a system of instruction for its youth, wherein neither the history of Christ’s Church, nor the language of God’s law, is considered a study of the smallest importance; wherein, of all subjects of human inquiry, his own religion is the one in which a youth’s ignorance is most easily forgiven; and in which it is held a light matter that he should be daily guilty of lying, or debauchery, or of blasphemy, so only that he write Latin verses accurately, and with speed.

I believe that in few years more we shall wake from all these errors in astonishment, as from evil dreams; having been preserved, in the midst of their madness, by those hidden roots of active and earnest Christianity which God’s grace has bound in the English nation with iron and brass.  But in the Venetian, those roots themselves had withered; and, from the palace of their ancient religion, their pride cast them forth hopelessly to the pasture of the brute.  From pride to infidelity, from infidelity to the unscrupulous and insatiable pursuit of pleasure, and from this to irremediable degradation, the transitions were swift, like the falling of a star.  The great palaces of the haughtiest nobles of Venice were stayed, before they had risen far above their foundations, by the blast of a penal poverty; and the wild grass, on the unfinished fragments of their mighty shafts, waves at the tide-mark where the power of the godless people first heard the “Hitherto shalt thou come.”  And the regeneration in which they had so vainly trusted, ­the new birth and clear dawning, as they thought it, of all art, all knowledge, and all hope, ­became to them as that dawn which Ezekiel saw on the hills of Israel:  “Behold the day; behold, it is come.  The rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded, violence is risen up into a rod of wickedness.  None of them shall remain, nor of their multitude; let not the buyer rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is upon all the multitude thereof.”