or fitter for his work, or more fit to be
heard by others, than Plato or St. Paul. There is not at this moment a
junior student in our schools of painting, who does not know fifty times
as much about the art as Giotto did; but he is not for that reason
greater than Giotto; no, nor his work better, nor fitter for our
beholding. Let him go on to know all that the human intellect can
discover and contain in the term of a long life, and he will not be one
inch, one line, nearer to Giotto's feet. But let him leave his academy
benches, and, innocently, as one knowing nothing, go out into the
highways and hedges, and there rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep
with them that weep; and in the next world, among the companies of the
great and good, Giotto will give his hand to him, and lead him into
their white circle, and say, "This is our brother."

Sec. IX. And the second important consequence of our feeling the soul's
preeminence will be our understanding the soul's language, however
broken, or low, or feeble, or obscure in its words; and chiefly that
great symbolic language of past ages, which has now so long been
unspoken. It is strange that the same cold and formal spirit which the
Renaissance teaching has raised amongst us, should be equally dead to
the languages of imitation and of symbolism; and should at once disdain
the faithful rendering of real nature by the modern school of the
Pre-Raphaelites, and the symbolic rendering of imagined nature in the
work of the thirteenth century. But so it is; and we find the same body
of modern artists rejecting Pre-Raphaelitism because it is not ideal!
and thirteenth century work, because it is not real!--their own practice
being at once false and un-ideal, and therefore equally opposed to both.

Sec. X. It is therefore, at this juncture, of much importance to mark
for the reader the exact relation of healthy symbolism and of healthy
imitation; and, in order to do so, let us return to one of our Venetian
examples of symbolic art, to the central cupola of St. Mark's. On that
cupola, as has been already stated, there is a mosaic representing the
Apostles on the Mount of Olives, with an olive-tree separating each from
the other; and we shall easily arrive at our purpose, by comparing the
means which would have been adopted by a modern artist bred in the
Renaissance schools,--that is to say, under the influence of Claude and
Poussin, and of the common teaching of the present day,--