iosity begins, you will be rhetorical,
but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit was sober
and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed
flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above
the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable
all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we
could have called one another by name without a moment's hesitation.
Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may
very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my
remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an
environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the
time. It was measurably the same within the church, but it was not quite
the same in the reserves I was obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged
to take in my rapture. The fact is, that unless you delight in a
hugeness whose bareness no ornamentation can, or does at least, conceal,
you do not find the interior of St. Peter's adequate to the exterior. In
the mere article of hugeness, even, it fails through the interposition
of the baldachin midway of the vast nave, and each detail seems to fail
of the office of beauty more lamentably than another.

I had known, I had never forgotten, that St. Peter's was very, very
baroque, but I had not known, I had not remembered how baroque it was.
It is not so badly baroque as the Church of the Jesuits either in Rome
or in Venice, or as the Cathedral at Wuerzburg; but still it is badly
baroque, though, again, not so baroque in the architecture as in the
sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and popes it could not
be more baroque; they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an
excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however
Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the
taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world,
now withered and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil
in art from its evil life. The saints and the popes are, aesthetically,
lamentable enough; but the allegories in bronze or marble, which are
mostly the sixteenth-century notions of the Virtues, are
inexpressible--some of these creatures ought really to be put out of the
place; but I suppose their friends would say they ought to be left as
typical of the period. In the case of that merciless misc