But it is
only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and
we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention
of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master.
I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed,
general associations with them, rather than particular recollections
of them.

One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments
are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the
walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety
of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and
deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a
superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness.
The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times,
and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood
and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis
is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete
and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of
Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still
have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for
the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they
believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith,
but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the
martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies
of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids
and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the
Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints.
If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were
much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly
Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to
heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal
with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look
like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus.
There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael's
time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the
beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in
the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and
spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, whic