ictorial treatment, that I will be so far tedious as to
show you one more instance of the relative intellectual value of the
pure color and pure chiaroscuro school, not in Dutch and Florentine, but
in English art. Here is a copy of one of the lost frescoes of our
Painted Chamber of Westminster;--fourteenth-century work, entirely
conceived in color, and calculated for decorative effect. There is no
more light and shade in it than in a Queen of Hearts in a pack of
cards;--all that the painter at first wants you to see is that the young
lady has a white forehead, and a golden crown, and a fair neck, and a
violet robe, and a crimson shield with golden leopards on it; and that
behind her is clear blue sky. Then, farther, he wants you to read her
name, "Debonnairete," which, when you have read, he farther expects you
to consider what it is to be debonnaire, and to remember your Chaucer's
description of the virtue:--

She was not brown, nor dun of hue,
But white as snowe, fallen new,
With eyen glad, and browes bent,
Her hair down to her heeles went,
And she was simple, as dove on tree,
Full debonnair of heart was she.

27. You see Chaucer dwells on the color just as much as the painter
does, but the painter has also given her the English shield to bear,
meaning that good-humor, or debonnairete, cannot be maintained by
self-indulgence;--only by fortitude. Farther note, with Chaucer, the
"eyen glad," and brows "bent" (high-arched and calm), the strong life,
(hair down to the heels,) and that her gladness is to be without
subtlety,--that is to say, without the slightest pleasure in any form of
advantage-taking, or any shrewd or mocking wit: "she was simple as dove
on tree;" and you will find that the color-painting, both in the fresco
and in the poem, is in the very highest degree didactic and
intellectual; and distinguished, as being so, from all inferior forms of
art. Farther, that it requires you yourself first to understand the
nature of simplicity, and to like simplicity in young ladies better than
subtlety; and to understand why the second of Love's five kind arrows
(Beaute being the first)--

Simplece ot nom, la seconde
Qui maint homme parmi le monde
Et mainte dame fait amer.

Nor must you leave the picture without observing that there is another
reason for Debonnairete's bearing the Royal shield,--of all shields
that, rather than another. "De-bonne-aire" meant originally "out of