more perfect in the objects of this Christian joyful pilgrimage (from Canterbury, as it were, instead of to it), the "Battle-fields round Paris"!

5. From Notre Dame I walked back into the livelier parts of the city, though in no very lively mood; but recovered some tranquillity in the Marché aux Fleurs, which is a pleasant spectacle in April, and then made some circuit of the Boulevards, where, as the Third Fors would have it, I suddenly came in view of one of the temples of the modern superstition, which is to replace Mariolatry. For it seems that human creatures must imagine something or some one in Apotheosis, and the Assumption of the Virgin, and Titian's or Tintoret's views on that matter being held reasonable no more, apotheosis of some other power follows as a matter of course. Here accordingly is one of the modern hymns on the Advent of Spring, which replace now in France the sweet Cathedral services of the Mois de Marie. It was printed in vast letters on a white sheet, dependent at the side of the porch or main entrance to the fur shop of the "Compagnie Anglo-Russe":

"Le printemps s'annonce avec son gracieux cortège de rayons et de fleurs. Adieu, l'hiver ! C'en est bien fini! Et cependant il faut que toutes ces fourrures soient enlevées, vendues, données, dans ces 6 jours. C'est une aubaine inesperée, un placement fabuleux; car, qu'on ne l'oublie pas, la fourrure vraie, la belle, la riche, a toujours sa valeur intrinsique. Et, comme couronnement de cette sorte d'APOTHÉOSE la Cie. Anglo-Russe remet gratis à tout acheteur un talisman merveilleux pour conserver la fourrure pendant 10 saisons."

"Unto Adam also, and to his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothed them."1

The Anglo-Russian company having now superseded Divine labour in such matters, you have also, instead of the grand old Dragon-Devil with his "Ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil," only a little weasel of a devil with an ermine tip to his tail, advising you "Ye shall be as Gods, buying your skins cheap."

6. I am a simpleton, am I, to quote such an exploded

1 [Genesis iii. 21; and for the next quotation, see ibid., iii. 5.]

book as Genesis? My good wiseacre readers, I know as many flaws in the book of Genesis as the best of

you, but I knew the book before I knew its flaws, while you know the flaws, and never have known the book, nor can know it. And it is at present much the worse for you; for indeed the stories of this book of Genesis have been the nursery tales of men mightiest whom the world has yet seen in art, and policy, and virtue, and none of you will write better stories for your children, yet awhile. And your little Cains will learn quickly enough to ask if they are their brother's keepers,' and your little Fathers of Canaan merrily enough to show their own father's nakedness without dread either of banishment or malediction;1 but many a day will pass, and their evil generations vanish with it, in that sudden nothingness of the wicked, "He passed away, and lo, he was not," before one will again rise, of whose death there may remain the Divine tradition, "He walked with God, and was not, for God took him."" Apotheosis ! How the dim hope of it haunts even the last degradation of men; and through the six thousand years from Enoch, and the vague Greek ages which dreamed of their twin-hero stars, declines, in this final stage of civilization, into dependence on the sweet promise of the AngloRussian tempter, with his ermine tail, "Ye shall be as Gods, and buy cat-skin cheap."

7. So it must be. I know it, my good wiseacres. You can have no more Queens of Heaven, nor assumptions of triumphing saints. Even your simple country Queen of May, whom once you worshipped for a goddess-has not little Mr. Faraday analysed her, and proved her to consist of charcoal and water, combined under what the Duke of Argyll calls the "reign of law"?4 Your once

1 [Genesis iv. 9; ix.]

2 [Psalms xxxvii. 36; Genesis v. 24.]

["Physically Faraday was below the middle size, well-set, active, and with extraordinary animation of countenance" (Tyndall in the Dictionary of National Biography).]

[For other references to the Duke's book so entitled, see Vol. XXIII. p. 115; and Letters 42, § 13, and 50, § 12 (below, pp. 102, 263); 82, § 16 n., and 87, § 8 (Vol. XXIX. pp. 236, 368).]

fortune-guiding stars, which used to twinkle in a mysterious manner, and to make you wonder what they were,-everybody knows what they are now: only hydrogen gas, and they stink as they twinkle. My wiseacre acquaintances, it is very fine, doubtless, for you to know all these things, who have plenty of money in your pockets, and nothing particular to burden your chemical minds; but for the poor, who have nothing in their pockets, and the wretched, who have much on their hearts, what in the world is the good of knowing that the only heaven they have to go to is a large gasometer?

"Poor and wretched!" you answer. "But when once everybody is convinced that heaven is a large gasometer, and when we have turned all the world into a small gasometer, and can drive round it by steam, and in forty minutes be back again where we were,'-nobody will be poor or wretched any more. Sixty pounds on the square inch, can anybody be wretched under that general application of high pressure?"?

(ASSISI, 15th April.)

8. Good wiseacres, yes; it seems to me, at least, more than probable: but if not, and you all find yourselves rich and merry, with steam legs and steel hearts, I am well assured there will be found yet room, where your telescopes have not reached, nor can,-grind you their lenses ever so finely,-room for the quiet souls, who choose for their part, poverty, with light and peace.

I am writing at a narrow window, which looks out on some broken tiles and a dead wall. A wall dead in the profoundest sense, you wiseacres would think it. Six hundred years old, and as strong as when it was built, and paying nobody any interest, and still less commission, on the cost of repair. Both sides of the street, or pathway

1 ["I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes."

-A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act ii. sc. 1.]

2 [See Letter 42, end of § 17 (p. 105).]

rather, it is not nine feet wide, are similarly built with solid blocks of grey marble, arched rudely above the windows, with here and there a cross on the keystones.

If I chose to rise from my work and walk a hundred yards down this street (if one may so call the narrow path between grey walls, as quiet and lonely as a sheep-walk on Shap Fells), I should come to a small prison-like door; and over the door is a tablet of white marble let into the grey, and on the tablet is written, in contracted Latin, what in English signifies:

"Here, Bernard the Happy * Received St. Francis of Assisi, And saw him, in ecstasy."

Good wiseacres, you believe nothing of the sort, do you? Nobody ever yet was in ecstasy, you think, till now, when they may buy cat-skin cheap?

9. Do you believe in Blackfriars Bridge, then; and admit that some day or other there must have been reason to call it "Black Friar's"? As surely as the bridge stands over Thames, and St. Paul's above it, these two men, Paul and Francis, had their ecstasies, in bygone days, concerning other matters than ermine tails; and still the same ecstasies, or effeminate sentiments, are possible to human creatures, believe it or not as you will. I am not now, whatever the Pall Mall Gazette may think, an ecstatic person myself. But thirty years ago I knew once or twice what joy meant, and have not forgotten the feeling; nay, even so little a

* "Bernard the happy." The Beato of Mont Oliveto; not Bernard of Clairvaux. The entire inscription is, "received St. Francis of Assisi to supper and bed"; but if I had written it so, it would have appeared that St. Francis's ecstasy was in consequence of his getting some supper.

1 [Now the Palazzo Sbaraglini. Ruskin's note identifying "Bernard the Happy" with the Beato of Monte Oliveto" (Bernard of Siena, who founded the Benedictine House of that place) is a mistake. The inscription refers to Bernard of Quintaville, the first companion of St. Francis; for the story of his inviting St. Francis to sup and lodge, see ch. ii. of the Fioretti.]

2 [Here the reference is clearly to the article (April 23, 1867) referred to above (p. 81 n.).]

2

while as two years ago, I had it back again-for a day.' And I can assure you, good wiseacres, there is such a thing to be had; but not in cheap shops, nor, I was going to say, for money; yet in a certain sense it is buyable-by forsaking all that a man hath. Buyable-literally enough -the freehold Elysian field at that price, but not a doit cheaper; and I believe, at this moment, the reason my voice has an uncertain sound, the reason that this design of mine stays unhelped, and that only a little group of men and women, moved chiefly by personal regard, stand with me in a course so plain and true, is that I have not yet given myself to it wholly, but have halted between good and evil, and sit still at the receipt of custom, and am always looking back from the plough.3

5

It is not wholly my fault this. There seem to me good reasons why I should go on with my work in Oxford; good reasons why I should have a house of my own with pictures and library; good reasons why I should still take interest from the bank; good reasons why I should make myself as comfortable as I can wherever I go, travel with two servants, and have a dish of game at dinner. It is true, indeed, that I have given the half of my goods and more to the poor; it is true also that the work in Oxford is not a matter of pride, but of duty with me; it is true that I think it wiser to live what seems to other people a rational and pleasant, not an enthusiastic, life; and that I serve my servants at least as much as they serve me. But, all this being so, I find there is yet something wrong; I have no peace, still less ecstasy. It seems to me as if one had indeed to wear camel's hair instead of dress coats before one can get that; and I was looking at St. Francis's camel'shair coat yesterday (they have it still in the sacristy ), and

1 [Probably in August 1872: see Vol. XXII. pp. xxviii., xxix.]

2 Luke xiv. 33.]

3 [See 1 Kings xviii. 21; Matthew ix. 9; and Luke ix. 62.]

[See Letter 21, § 18 (Vol. XXVII. p. 363), and 44, § 14 (below, p. 139); and compare Letter 80, § 15 (Vol. XXIX. p. 185).]

6 [Luke xix. 8.j

[Compare Hortus Inclusus, pp. 2-4 (pp. 3-5 of ed. 3).]