e a servant of beauty as
Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own
paintings into the flames--to the lugubrious rejoicings of the
sanctimonious Piagnoni--as Savonarola's followers were called;
predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later,
were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed
psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers. When Charles the First

bow'd his comely head
Down, as upon a bed,

at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side.
Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking
of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace,
and gentle manners, and personal adornments. Gaiety became penal, and a
happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,--something like
hanging matters--but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been
rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth. Such as were
left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty
in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to
bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob--those

Storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light,

which even the Puritan Milton could thus celebrate. Doubtless, that
English Puritan persecution was the severest that Beauty has been called
upon to endure. She still suffers from it, need one say, to this day,
particularly in New England, where if the sculptured images of goddess
and nymph are not exactly broken to pieces by the populace, it is from
no goodwill towards them, but rather from an ingrained reverence for
any form of property, even though it be nude, and where, at all events,
they are under the strict surveillance of a highly proper and
respectable police, those distinguished guardians of American morals.

It is worth while to try and get at the reason for this wide-spread,
deep-rooted, fear of beauty: for some reason there must surely be. Such
instinctive feelings, on so broad a scale, are not accidental. And so
soon as one begins to analyse the attitude of religion towards beauty,
the reason is not far to seek.

All religions are made up of a spiritual element and a moral element,
the moral element being the temporary, practical, so to say, working
side of religion, concerned with this present world, and the limitations
and necessities of the various so