cause of difference in our training--not slight,--the
aspect of religion, namely, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden. I
say the aspect; for that was all the lad could judge by. Disposed, for
the most part, to learn chiefly by his eyes, in this special matter he
finds there is really no other way of learning. His father had taught
him "to lay one penny upon another." Of mother's teaching, we hear of
none; of parish pastoral teaching, the reader may guess how much.

I chose Giorgione rather than Veronese to help me in carrying out this
parallel; because I do not find in Giorgione's work any of the early
Venetian monarchist element. He seems to me to have belonged more to an
abstract contemplative school. I may be wrong in this; it is no
matter;--suppose it were so, and that he came down to Venice somewhat
recusant, or insentient, concerning the usual priestly doctrines of his
day,--how would the Venetian religion, from an outer intellectual
standing-point, have _looked_ to him?

He would have seen it to be a religion indisputably powerful in human
affairs; often very harmfully so; sometimes devouring widows'
houses,[124] and consuming the strongest and fairest from among the
young; freezing into merciless bigotry the policy of the old: also, on
the other hand, animating national courage, and raising souls,
otherwise sordid, into heroism: on the whole, always a real and great
power; served with daily sacrifice of gold, time, and thought; putting
forth its claims, if hypocritically, at least in bold hypocrisy, not
waiving any atom of them in doubt or fear; and, assuredly, in large
measure, sincere, believing in itself, and believed: a goodly system,
moreover, in aspect; gorgeous, harmonious, mysterious;--a thing which
had either to be obeyed or combated, but could not be scorned. A
religion towering over all the city--many-buttressed--luminous in
marble stateliness, as the dome of our Lady of Safety[125] shines over
the sea; many-voiced also, giving, over all the eastern seas, to the
sentinel his watchword, to the soldier his war-cry; and, on the lips of
all who died for Venice, shaping the whisper of death.

I suppose the boy Turner to have regarded the religion of his city also
from an external intellectual standing-point.

What did he see in Maiden Lane?

Let not the reader be offended with me; I am willing to let him
describe, at his own pleasure, what Turner saw there; but to me, it
seems to have been this. A r