while as two years ago, I had it back again-for a day.1 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.2 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 [Probably in August 1872: see Vol. XXII. pp. xxviii., xxix.] 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).] [Luke xix. 8.] 6 [Compare Hortus Inclusus, pp. 2-4 (pp. 3–5 of ed. 3).] I don't like the look of it at all; the Anglo-Russian Company's wear is ever so much nicer, let the devil at least have this due. 10. And he must have a little more due even than this. It is not at all clear to me how far the Beggar and Pauper Saint, whose marriage with the Lady Poverty I have come here to paint from Giotto's dream of it,2-how far, I say, the mighty work he did in the world was owing to his vow of poverty, or diminished by it. If he had been content to preach love alone, whether among poor or rich, and if he had understood that love, for all God's creatures, was one and the same blessing; and that, if he was right to take the doves out of the fowler's hand, that they might build their nests, he was himself wrong when he went out in the winter's night on the hills, and made for himself dolls of snow, and said, "Francis, these-behold-these are thy wife and thy children." If instead of quitting his father's trade, that he might nurse lepers, he had made his father's trade holy and pure, and honourable more than beggary, perhaps at this day the Black Friars might yet have had an unruined house by Thames shore, and the children of his native village not be standing in the porches of the temple built over his tomb, to ask alms of the infidel. 1 [See above, p. 84.] [See below, p. 163.] "By the breath of that infernal enemy which is wont to kindle the fire of concupiscence, he was assailed by a violent temptation. Then this holy lover of chastity. went out into the garden, and plunged into a heap of snow which had just then fallen. Having done this he gathered the snow in his hands, and made seven heaps, which setting before him, he thus discoursed with his inner man. 'Behold,' said he, this largest heap is thy wife; these four are thy two sons and thy two daughters; the other two are thy servant and thy handmaid; and for all these thou art bound to provide. Make haste, then, and provide clothing for them, lest they perish with cold. But if the solicitude for so many trouble thee, then be thou solicitous to serve one Lord alone'" (The Life of S. Francis of Assisi, from the “Legenda Santi Francisci” of S. Bonaventure. Edited, with a Preface, by Archbishop Manning, 1868, pp. 57-58). For his setting free the animals that were brought to him, see ibid., pp. 102-108; his father, Pietro Bernardone, was a cotton merchant; for his nursing the lepers, see Vol. XXII. p. 409 n.] LETTER 42 MISERICORDIA1 1. I MUST construct my letters still, for a while, of swept-up fragments; 2 every day provokes me to write new matter; but I must not lose the fruit of the old days. Here is some worth picking up, though ill-ripened for want of sunshine (the little we had spending itself on the rain), last year. 1st August, 1873. Not being able to work steadily this morning, because there was a rainbow half a mile broad, and violet-bright, on the shoulders of the Old Man of Coniston-(by calling it half a mile broad, I mean that half a mile's breadth of mountain was covered by it, and by calling it violet-bright, I mean that the violet zone of it came pure against the grey rocks; and note, by the way, that essentially all the colours of the rainbow are secondary;-yellow exists only as a line-red as a line-blue as a line; but the zone itself is of varied orange, green, and violet),—not being able, I say, for steady work, I opened an old diary of 1849, and as the Third Fors would have it, at this extract from the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.3 2. (Venice.) "The Prince of Saxony went to see the Arsenal three days ago, waited on by a numerous nobility of both sexes; the Bucentaur was adorned and [See below, § 11. Rejected titles for this letter were "Let not Mercy and Truth forsake thee"" (Proverbs iii. 3: see § 13) and "Venice in her White Cravat” (see § 5).] 2 [See above, p. 62.] 3 [Letters from Venice, March 29, April 19, 1740: see pp. 283, 284, 285 of vol. ii. of The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1837); for another reference to her letters from Venice, see Vol. IX. p. xxiv.] I was launched, a magnificent collation given; and we sailed a little in it. in company with the Signora Justiniani Gradenigo and Signora Marina Crizzo. There were two cannons founded in his (the Prince of Saxony's) presence, and a galley built and launched in an hour's time." (Well may Dante speak of that busy Arsenal!1) "Last night there was a concert of voices and instruments at the Hospital of the Incurabili, where there were two girls that in the opinion of all people excel either Faustina or Cuzzoni, "I am invited to-morrow to the Foscarini to dinner, which is to be followed by a concert and a ball." The account of a regatta follows, in which the various nobles had boats costing £1000 sterling each, none less than £500, and enough of them to look like a little fleet. The Signora Pisani Mocenigo's represented the Chariot of the Night, drawn by four sea-horses, and showing the rising of the moon, accompanied with stars, the statues on each side representing the Hours, to the number of twentyfour. Pleasant times, these, for Venice! one's Bucentaur launched, wherein to eat, buoyantly, a magnificent collation -beautiful ladies driving their ocean steeds in the Chariot of the Night-beautiful songs, at the Hospital of the Incurabili. Much bettered, these, from the rough days when one had to row and fight for life, thought Venice; better days still, in the nineteenth century, being as she appears to believe now-in store for her. 2 3. You thought, I suppose, that in writing those numbers of Fors last year from Venice and Verona, I was idling, or digressing? Nothing of the kind. The business of Fors is to tell you of Venice and Verona; and many things of them. You don't care about Venice and Verona? Of course not. Who does? And I beg you to observe that the day is coming when, exactly in the same sense, active working men will say to any antiquarian who purposes to tell them something of England, "We don't care about 1 [Inferno, xxi. See Letter 18, § 12 (Vol. XXVII. p. 313).] [This passage was written in 1873, and the reference is to Letters of 1872: see Letters 19, 20, Vol. XXVII. pp. 320, 334.] England." And the antiquarian will answer, just as I have answered you now, "Of course not. Who does?" 2 4. Nay, the saying has been already said to me, and by a wise and good man. When I asked, at the end of my inaugural lecture at Oxford,' "Will you, youths of England, make your country again a royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the world a source of light-a centre of peace?"-my University friends came to me, with grave faces, to remonstrate against irrelevant and Utopian topics of that nature being introduced in lectures on art; and a very dear American friend wrote to me, when I sent the lecture to him, in some such terms as these: "Why will you diminish your real influence for good, by speaking as if England could now take any dominant place in the world? How many millions, think you, are there here, of the activest spirits of their time, who care nothing for England, and would read no farther, after coming upon such a passage?" That England deserves little care from any man nowadays, is fatally true; that in a century more she will bewhere Venice is among the dead of nations, is far more than probable. And yet-that you do not care for dead Venice, is the sign of your own ruin; and that the Americans do not care for dying England, is only the sign of their inferiority to her. For this dead Venice once taught us to be merchants, sailors, and gentlemen; and this dying England taught the Americans all they have of speech, or thought, hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking birds. An American republican woman, lately, describes a child which "like cherubim and seraphim continually did |