d 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."

FOOTNOTES:

[8] Or, more briefly, science has to do with facts, art with
phenomena. To science, phenomena are of use only as they lead to
facts; and to art facts are of use only as they lead to phenomena. I
use the word "art" here with reference to the fine arts only, for
the lower arts of mechanical production I should reserve the word
"manufacture."

[9] Tintoret.

[10] St. Bernard.

[11] Society always has a destructive influence upon an artist:
first by its sympathy with his meanest powers; secondly, by its
chilling want of understanding of his greatest; and, thirdly, by its
vain occupation of his time and thoughts. Of course a painter of men
must be _among_ men; but it ought to be as a watcher, not as a
companion.

[12] I intended in this place to