e, and if art were still doing all that it did once for Rome.
But the grossness of the error becomes incomprehensible as well as
unpardonable, when we look to what level of degradation the human
intellect has sunk at this instant in Italy. So far from Romanism now
producing anything greater in art, it cannot even preserve what has been
given to its keeping. I know no abuses of precious inheritance half so
grievous, as the abuse of all that is best in art wherever the Romanist
priesthood gets possession of it. It amounts to absolute infatuation.
The noblest pieces of mediaeval sculpture in North Italy, the two
griffins at the central (west) door of the cathedral of Verona, were
daily permitted to be brought into service, when I was there in the
autumn of 1849, by a washerwoman living in the Piazza, who tied her
clothes-lines to their beaks: and the shafts of St. Mark's at Venice
were used by a salesman of common caricatures to fasten his prints upon
(Compare Appendix 25); and this in the face of the continually passing
priests: while the quantity of noble art annually destroyed in
altarpieces by candle-droppings, or perishing by pure brutality of
neglect, passes all estimate. I do not know, as I have repeatedly
stated, how far the splendor of architecture, or other art, is
compatible with the honesty and usefulness of religious service. The
longer I live, the more I incline to severe judgment in this matter, and
the less I can trust the sentiments excited by painted glass and colored
tiles. But if there be indeed value in such things, our plain duty is to
direct our strength against the superstition which has dishonored them;
there are thousands who might possibly be benefited by them, to whom
they are now merely an offence, owing to their association with
idolatrous ceremonies. I have but this exhortation for all who love
them,--not to regulate their creeds by their taste in colors, but to
hold calmly to the right, at whatever present cost to their imaginative
enjoyment; sure that they will one day find in heavenly truth a brighter
charm than in earthly imagery, and striving to gather stones for the
eternal building, whose walls shall be salvation, and whose gates shall
be praise.

13. MR. FERGUSSON'S SYSTEM.

The reader may at first suppose this division of the attributes of
buildings into action, voice, and beauty, to be the same division as Mr.
Fergusson's, now well known, of their merits, into technic, aestheti