But if, as in this case, he wants to oppose the simplicity of his central subject with a rich background, a labyrinth of ornamental lines to relieve the severity of expressive ones,-he will carve you a carpet, or a tree, or a rose thicket, with their fringes and leaves and thorns, elaborated as richly as natural ones; but always for the sake of the ornamental form, never of the imitation; yet, seizing the natural character in the lines he gives, with twenty times the precision and clearness of sight that the mere imitator has. -Mornings in Florence, I.

16. THE BYZANTINES.-Foolish modern critics have seen nothing in the Byzantine school but a barbarism to be conquered and forgotten. But that school brought to the art-scholars of the thirteenth century, laws which had been serviceable to Phidias, and symbols which had been beautiful to Homer. And methods and habits of pictorial scholarship, which gave a refinement of manner to the work of the simplest craftsman, and became an education to the higher artists. which no discipline of literature can now bestow, developed themselves in the effort to decipher, and the impulse to re-interpret, the Eleusinian divinity of Byzantine tradition.-V. d'A., III., § 87.

17. THE EFFIGY OF ILARIA DI CARETTO.— This sculpture is central in every respect; being

the last Florentine work in which the proper form of the Etruscan tomb is preserved, and the first in which all right Christian sentiment respecting death is embodied. It is perfectly severe in classical tradition, and perfectly frank in concession to the passions of existing life. It submits to all the laws of the past, and expresses all the hopes of the future.

Now every work of the great Christian schools expresses primarily, conquest over death; conquest not grievous, but absolute and serene; rising with the greatest of them, into rapture.

But this, as a central work, has all the peace of the Christian Eternity, but only in part its gladness. Young children wreathe round the tomb a garland of abundant flowers, but she herself, Ilaria, yet sleeps; the time is not yet come for her to be awakened out of sleep.

Her image is a simple portrait of her-how much less beautiful than she was in life, we cannot know-but as beautiful as marble can be. . And through and in the marble we may see that the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth: yet as visibly a sleep that shall know no ending until the last day break, and the last shadow flee away; until then, she "shall not return." Her hands are laid on her breast-not prayingshe has no need to pray now. She wears her dress of every day, clasped at her throat, girdled at her waist, the hem of it drooping over her feet.

No disturbance of its folds by pain of sickness, no binding, no shrouding of her sweet form, in death more than in life. As a soft, low wave of summer sea, her breast rises; no more: the rippled gathering of its close mantle droops to the belt, then sweeps to her feet, straight as drifting snow. And at her feet her dog lies watching her; the mystery of his mortal life joined, by love, to her immortal one.

Few know, and fewer love, the tomb and its place, not shrine, for it stands bare by the cathedral wall: only, by chance, a cross is cut deep into one of the foundation stones behind her head. But no goddess statue of the Greek cities, no nun's image among the cloisters of Apennine, no fancied light of angel in the homes of heaven, has more divine rank among the thoughts of men.-Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (O. R., I., § 249).

18. SYMBOLIC ORNAMENT.-A symbol is scarely ever invented just when it is needed. Some already recognised and accepted form or thing becomes symbolic at a particular time. Horses had tails, and the moon quarters, long before there were Turks; but the horse-tail and crescent are not less definitely symbolic to the Ottoman. So, the early forms of ornament are nearly alike, among all nations of any capacity for design: they put meaning into them after

wards, if they ever come themselves to have any meaning. Vibrate but the point of a tool against an unbaked vase, as it revolves, set on the wheel, -you have a wavy or zigzag line. The vase revolves once; the ends of the wavy line do not exactly tally when they meet; you get over the blunder by turning one into a head, the other into a tail, and have a symbol of eternity—if, first, which is wholly needful, you have an idea of eternity!

Again, the free sweep of a pen at the finish. of a large letter has a tendency to throw itself into a spiral. There is no particular intelligence, or spiritual emotion, in the production of this line. A worm draws it with his coil, a fern with its bud, and a periwinkle with his shell. Yet, completed in the Ionic capital, and arrested in the bending point of the acanthus leaf in the Corinthian one, it has become the primal element of beautiful architecture and ornament in all the ages; and is eloquent with endless symbolism, representing the power of the winds and waves in Athenian work, and of the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, in Gothic work; or, indeed, often enough, of both, the Devil being held prince of the power of the air-as in the story of Job, and the lovely story of Buonconte of Montefeltro, in Dante: nay, in this very tale of Theseus, as Chaucer tells it,-having got hold, by ill luck, only of the later and calumnious notion

that Theseus deserted his saviour-mistress, he wishes him Devil-speed instead of God-speed, and that energetically-"A twenty-divel way the wind him drive."-F. C., Letter 23.

19. PERFECT ILLUMINATION is only writing made lovely; the moment it passes into picturemaking it has lost its dignity and function. For pictures, small or great, if beautiful, ought not to be painted on leaves of books, to be worn with service; and pictures, small or great, not beautiful, should be painted nowhere. But to make writing itself beautiful,-to make the sweep of the pen lovely,—is the true art of illumination; and I particularly wish you to note this, because it happens continually that young girls who are incapable of tracing a single curve with steadiness, much more of delineating any ornamental or organic form with correctness, think that work, which would be intolerable in ordinary drawing, becomes tolerable when it is employed for the decoration of texts; and thus they render all healthy progress impossible, by protecting themselves in inefficiency under the shield of good motive. Whereas the right way of setting to work is to make themselves first mistresses of the art of writing beautifully; and then to apply that art in its proper degrees of development to whatever they desire permanently to write.-L. A., V., § 143.