ich they have been brought up is
evil or not. They _must_ be good soldiers and hunters--that is their
life; yet they know that killing is evil, and they do not expect to find
wild beasts in heaven. They have been trained by pain, by violence, by
hunger and cold. They know there is a good in these things as well as
evil: they are perpetually hesitating between the one and the other
thought of them. But one thing they see clearly, that killing and
hunting, and every form of misery, pleasure, and of passion, must
somehow at last be subdued by law, which shall bring good out of it all,
and which they feel more and more constraining them every hour. Now, if
with this sympathy you look at their dragon and wild beast decoration,
you will find that it now tells you about these Lombards far more than
they could know of themselves.... All the actions, and much more the
arts, of men tell to others, not only what the worker does not know, but
what he can never know of himself, which you can only recognize by being
in an element more advanced and wider than his.... In deliberate
symbolism, the question is always, not what a symbol meant first or
meant elsewhere, but what it means now and means here. Now, this dragon
symbol of the Lombard is used of course all over the world; it means
good here, and evil there; sometimes means nothing; sometimes
everything. You have always to ask what the man who here uses it means
by it. Whatever is in his mind, that he is sure partly to express by
it; nothing else than that can he express by it."

236. II. In the second period Mr. Ruskin said was to be found "the
highest development of Italian character and chivalry, with an entirely
believed Christian religion; you get, therefore, joy and courtesy, and
hope, and a lovely peace in death. And with these you have two fearful
elements of evil. You have first such confidence in the virtue of the
creed that men hate and persecute all who do not accept it. And worse
still, you find such confidence in the power of the creed that men not
only can do anything that is wrong, and be themselves for a word of
faith pardoned, but are even sure that after the wrong is done God is
sure to put it all right again for them, or even make things better than
they were before. Now, I need not point out to you how the spirit of
persecution, as well as of vain hope founded on creed only, is mingled
in every line with the lovely moral teaching of the 'Divina Conmedia,'
nor