s or prose tales worth editing
instead; half-pagan, mediaeval priest lore, believed in by men and women
who have not been given anything to believe instead; easy-going,
all-permitting fifteenth century scepticism, not yet replaced by the
scientific and socialistic disbelief which is puritanic and
iconoclastic; sly and savage habits of vengeance still doing service
among the lower classes instead of the orderly chicanery of modern
justice;--these are the things, and a hundred others besides, concrete
and spiritual, things too magnificent, too sordid, too irregular, too
nauseous, too beautiful, and, above all, too utterly unpractical and
old-fashioned for our times, which I call the rags of the Renaissance,
and with which Italy still ekes out her scanty apparel of modern
thoughts and things.

It is living among such things, turn by turn delighted by their beauty
and offended by their foulness, that one acquires the habit of spending
a part only of one's intellectual and moral life in the present, and the
rest in the past. Impressions are not derived from description, and
thoughts are not suggested by books. The juxtaposition of concrete
objects invites the making of a theory as the jutting out of two
branches invites the spinning of a spider's web. You find everywhere
your facts without opening a book. The explanation which I have tried to
give of the exact manner in which mediaeval art was influenced by the
remains of antiquity, came like a flash during a rainy morning in the
Pisan Campo Santo; the working out and testing of that explanation in
its details was a matter of going from one church or gallery to the
other, a reference or two to Vasari for some date or fact being the only
necessary reading; and should any one at this moment ask me for
substantiation of that theory, instead of opening books I would take
that person to this Sienese Cathedral, and there bid him compare the
griffins and arabesques, the delicate figure and foliage ornaments
carved in wood and marble by the latter Middle Ages, with the griffins
and arabesques, the boldly bossed horsemen, the exquisite fruit garlands
of a certain antique altar stone which the builders of the church used
as a base to a pillar, and which must have been a never-ceasing-object
of study to every draughtsman and stoneworker in Siena.

Nor are such everywhere-scattered facts ready for working into theoretic
shape, the most which Italy still affords to make the study of the