have told you,' is the first practical opinion of his I want you to be well informed of.

Since that last Fors was written, one of my friends found for me the most beautiful of all the symbols in the picture of the Dream;2-one of those which leap to the eyes when they are understood, yet which, in the sweet enigma, I had deliberately twice painted, without understanding.3

At the head of the princess's bed is embroidered her shield (of which elsewhere');-but on a dark blue-green space in the cornice above it is another very little and bright shield, it seemed,-but with no bearing. I painted 1 [See above, p. 732.]

[The following letter to Mr. James Reddie Anderson bears upon these

matters:

“VENICE, 3rd January, 1877.

"MY DEAREST JAMIE,-I should have written to you on the first day of the year, had I not been passing, since Christmas day, through a course of teaching, which began with a gift from St. Ursula of a sprig of vervain, and a pot of pinks, with her love,' and went on unceasingly through the Christmas week and New Year's day, closing and leaving me again in this material world-yesterday morning. The principal piece of it was through your discovery of the Porphyrio, and I am certain now that what you and Mr. Caird have done is the most important contribution to historical theology that could possibly have been made in these days, and I look with quite intense and securely trustful interest to the results of your collected evidence.

"Infidel that you were! You will end by living a Vita Nuova, and giving it to many and many a soul besides.

"I have been to look at St. Jerome, but it was too dark for the astronomy.

"The last (probable) additions to our picture reading of the Dream are that the deep crimson rods of the flower-pot are the four nails and lance point of her Lord, and that the singularly open book in her bookcase is the Book of her Life, the black clasp-arrow-head again--marking the place where, in sacred pause, Quel giorno non piu leggemmo avanti.' Both these symbols are Mr. Bunney's finding (except the_Dante finish, which is my little contribution-but owing to your hint about Dante). "Ever your affectionate, "J. R.

For the "gift from St. Ursula," see in the next volume, p. 30. For the "discovery of the Porphyrio," ("the bird of chastity with the bent spray of vervain in its beak"), see St. Mark's Rest, § 28 (Vol. XXIV. p. 230). The "contribution to historical theology" is doubtless the interpretation of "St. Jerome in his Study," given in St. Mark's Rest, Vol. XXIV. pp. 353-356. For the quotation from Dante, see Inferno, v. 138 (quoted also above, p. 354).]

3 [See Letter 20, §§ 14, 15 (Vol. XXVII. p. 342).]

[Ruskin did not, however, return to the subject. By "elsewhere" he probably meant his intended, but unwritten, "Separate Guide to the Works of Carpaccio in Venice" (see Vol. XXIV. p. 179 n.).]

it, thinking it was meant merely for a minute repetition of the escutcheon below, and that the painter had not taken the trouble to blazon the bearings again. (I might have known Carpaccio never would even omit without meaning.) And I never noticed that it was not in a line above the escutcheon, but exactly above the princess's head. It gleams with bright silver edges out of the dark-blue ground-the point of the mortal Arrow!

At the time it was painted the sign would necessarily have been recognized in a moment; and it completes the meaning of the vision without any chance of mistake.

6. And it seems to me, guided by such arrow-point, the purpose of Fors that I should make clear the meaning of what I have myself said on this matter, throughout the six years in which I have been permitted to carry on the writing of these letters, and to preface their series for the seventh year, with the interpretation of this Myth of Venice.

I have told you that all Carpaccio's sayings are of knowledge, not of opinion.' And I mean by knowledge, communicable knowledge. Not merely personal, however certain -like Job's "I know that my Redeemer liveth," but discovered truth, which can be shown to all men who are willing to receive it. No great truth is allowed by nature to be demonstrable to any person who, foreseeing its consequences, desires to refuse it. He has put himself into the power of the Great Deceiver; and will in every effort be only further deceived, and place more fastened faith in his

error.

7. This, then, is the truth which Carpaccio knows, and would teach :

That the world is divided into two groups of men; the first, those whose God is their God, and whose glory is their glory, who mind heavenly things; and the second, men whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their

1 [See Letter 71, § 1 (p. 732).]

2 [Job xix. 25.]

2

shame,* who mind earthly things.' That is just as demonstrable a scientific fact as the separation of land from water. There may be any quantity of intermediate mind, in various conditions of bog;-some, wholesome Scotch peat,-some, Pontine marsh,-some, sulphurous slime, like what people call water in English manufacturing towns; but the elements of Croyance and Mescroyance are always chemically separable out of the putrescent mess: by the faith that is in it, what life or good it can still keep, or do, is possible; by the miscreance in it, what mischief it can do, or annihilation it can suffer, is appointed for its work and fate. All strong character curdles itself out of the scum into its own place and power, or impotence: and they that sow to the Flesh, do of the Flesh reap corruption; and they that sow to the Spirit, do of the Spirit reap Life.3

I pause, without writing "everlasting," as perhaps you expected. Neither Carpaccio nor I know anything about Duration of life, or what the word translated "everlasting,” means.1 Nay, the first sign of noble trust in God and man, is to be able to act without any such hope. All the heroic deeds, all the purely unselfish passions of our existence, depend on our being able to live, if need be, through the Shadow of Death: and the daily heroism of simply brave men consists in fronting and accepting Death as such, trusting that what their Maker decrees for them shall be well.

8. But what Carpaccio knows, and what I know also, are precisely the things which your wiseacre apothecaries,

* Mr. Darwin's last discoveries of the gestures of honour and courtesy among baboons are a singular completion of the types of this truth in the natural world.6

1 [Philippians iii. 19.]

[Compare Letters 5 and 25 (Vol. XXVII. pp. 81, 466).]

3 Galatians vi. 8.]

On the meaning of alúvios, translated "everlasting" (without any sufficient authority), see Excursus III. in Dean Farrar's Eternal Hope.]

seq.).

[Compare Crown of Wild Olive, Introduction, §§ 13 seq. (Vol. XVIII. pp. 394

[The reference is to a paper by Darwin in Nature, November 2, 1876 (vol. 15, pp. 18, 19) describing certain "indecorous habits" of monkeys on occasions of ceremony and in courtship.]

and their apprentices, and too often your wiseacre rectors and vicars, and their apprentices, tell you that you can't know, because "eye hath not seen nor ear heard them,” the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God has revealed them to us,1-to Carpaccio, and Angelico, and Dante, and Giotto, and Filippo Lippi, and Sandro Botticelli, and me, and to every child that has been taught to know its Father in heaven,-by the Spirit ; because we have minded, or do mind, the things of the Spirit in some measure, and in such measure have entered into our rest.

"The things which God hath prepared for them that love Him." Hereafter, and up there, above the clouds, you have been taught to think; until you were informed by your land-surveyors that there was neither up nor down; but only an axis of x and an axis of y; and by aspiring aeronauts that there was nothing in the blue but damp and azote. And now you don't believe these things are prepared anywhere? They are prepared just as much as ever, when and where they used to be: just now, and here, close at your hand. All things are prepared,—come ye to the marriage. Up and down on the old highways which your fathers trod, and under the hedges of virgin's bower and wild rose which your fathers planted, there are the messengers crying to you to come. Nay, at your very doors, though one is just like the other in your model lodging-houses, there is One knocking, if you would open, with something better than tracts in His basket ;-supper, and very material supper, if you will only condescend to eat of angels' food first. There are meats for the belly, and the belly for meats: doth not your Father know that ye have need of these things? But if you make your belly your only love, and your meats your only masters, God shall destroy both it and them.

2

1 [1 Corinthians ii. 9, 10. The other Bible references in § 8 are Romans viii. 5; Hebrews iv. 11; Matthew xxii. 4; Revelation iii. 20; 1 Corinthians vi. 13; Luke xii. 30; and Psalms xiv. 1.]

2 [For explanation of this passage, see Letter 74, § 7 (Vol. XXIX. p. 35).]

1

Truly, it is hard for you to hear the low knocking in the hubbub of your Vanity Fair. You are living in the midst of the most perfectly miscreant crowd that ever blasphemed creation. Not with the old snap-finger blasphemy of the wantonly profane, but the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: "Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour's goods." Here's one of my own boys' getting up that lesson beside me for his next Oxford examination. For Adam Smith is accepted as the outcome of Practical Philosophy, at our universities; and their youth urged to come out high in competitive blasphemy. Not the old snap-finger sort,* I repeat, but that momentary sentiment, deliberately adopted for a national law. I must turn aside for a minute or two to explain this to you.

9. The eighth circle of Dante's Hell (compare Fors of December, 1872, Letter 24, § 153) is the circle of fraud, divided into ten gulphs; in the seventh of these gulphs are the Thieves, by Fraud,-brilliantly now represented by the men who covet their neighbours' goods and take them in any way they think safe, by high finance, sham companies, cheap goods, or any other of our popular modern ways.

Now there is not in all the Inferno quite so studied a piece of descriptive work as Dante's relation of the infection of one cursed soul of this crew by another. They

* In old English illuminated Psalters, of which I hope soon to send a perfect example to Sheffield to companion our Bible, the vignette of the Fool saying in his heart, "There is no God," nearly always represents him in this action. Vanni Fucci makes the Italian sign of the Fig,-"A fig for you!" 5

[For another reference to Adam Smith's "new Commandment," see Letters 78 and 79 (Vol. XXIX. pp. 134, 146).]

[One of his Oxford pupils, with him at this time in Venice: see Vol. XXIV. p. xli.]

3 [Vol. XXVII. p. 426.]

5

The Psalter referred to was, however, not sent.]

Dante, Inferno, xxv. 2, where in noticing the sacrilegious Vanni Fucci, Dante describes how "the sinner raised his hands pointed in mockery” (“le mani alzò con ambedue le fiche")—the practice of thrusting out the_thumb between the first and second fingers having prevailed very generally among European nations as an expression of insolent contempt.]