vant of
God preached and prayed, and here by his faithful and loving service he
so endeared himself to all around him that he has been canonized by an
epithet no other saint of the English Church has had bestowed upon him.
His life as pictured by Izaak Walton is, to borrow one of his own lines,
"A box where sweets compacted lie;"
and I felt, as I left his little chapel and the parsonage which he
rebuilt as a free-will offering, as a pilgrim might feel who had just
left the holy places at Jerusalem.
Among the places which I saw in my first visit was Longford Castle, the
seat of the Earl of Radnor. I remembered the curious triangular
building, constructed with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, as
churches are built in the form of the cross. I remembered how the
omnipresent spire of the great cathedral, three miles away, looked down
upon the grounds about the building as if it had been their next-door
neighbor. I had not forgotten the two celebrated Claudes, Morning and
Evening. My eyes were drawn to the first of these two pictures when I
was here before; now they turned naturally to the landscape with the
setting sun. I have read my St. Ruskin with due reverence, but I have
never given up my allegiance to Claude Lorraine. But of all the fine
paintings at Longford Castle, no one so much impressed me at my recent
visit as the portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein. This is one of those
pictures which help to make the Old World worth a voyage across the
Atlantic. Portraits of Erasmus are not uncommon; every scholar would
know him if he met him in the other world with the look he wore on
earth. All the etchings and their copies give a characteristic
presentation of the spiritual precursor of Luther, who pricked the false
image with his rapier which the sturdy monk slashed with his broadsword.
What a face it is which Hans Holbein has handed down to us in this
wonderful portrait at Longford Castle! How dry it is with scholastic
labor, how keen with shrewd scepticism, how worldly-wise, how conscious
of its owner's wide-awake sagacity! Erasmus and Rabelais,--Nature used
up all her arrows for their quivers, and had to wait a hundred years and
more before she could find shafts enough for the outfit of Voltaire,
leaner and keener than Erasmus, and almost as free in his language as
the audacious creator of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
I have not generally given descriptions of the curious objects which I
saw in the great
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