ntirely wild in "Barnaby Budge," where, with a corps de drame
composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman-fool who is also a
villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a
shriveled virago, and a doll in ribbons--carrying this company through
riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother,
and the idiot, runs the gentleman-fool through in a bloody duel, and
burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be
content without shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to
the doll in a wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also
married in _two_ wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is
the very sign manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it,
with a love of thorniness--(in their mystic root, the truncation of the
limbless serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare "Modern
Painters," vol. iv., "Chapter on the Mountain Gloom," s. 19); and in
_all_ forms of it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the
blood, whence the last Darwinian process of the witches' charm--"cool it
with a baboon's _blood, then_ the charm is firm and good." The two
frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the
streets of London (the baboon with the mirror, and the Maskelyne and
Cooke decapitation) are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque
under this influence; and it is well worth while to get the number for
the week ending April 3, 1880, of "Young Folks--a magazine of
instructive and entertaining literature for boys and girls of all ages,"
containing "A Sequel to Desdichado" (the modern development of Ivanhoe),
in which a quite monumental example of the kind of art in question will
be found as a leading illustration of this characteristic sentence,
"See, good Cerberus," said Sir Rupert, "_my hand has been struck off.
You must make me a hand of iron, one with springs in it, so that I can
make it grasp a dagger_." The text is also, as it professes to be,
instructive; being the ultimate degeneration of what I have above called
the "folly" of "Ivanhoe"; for the folly begets folly down, and down; and
whatever Scott and Turner did wrong has thousands of imitators--their
wisdom none will so much as hear, how much less follow!

In both of the Masters, it is always to be remembered that the evil and
good are alike conditions of literal _vision_: and therefore also,
inseparably connected with the state