the judgment-seat of Pilate, where all is
unseen, unfelt, except the one figure that stands with its head bowed
down, pale like the pillar of moonlight, half bathed in the glory of the
Godhead, half wrapt in the whiteness of the shroud. Of these and all
other thoughts of indescribable power that are now fading from the walls
of those neglected chambers, I may perhaps endeavour at a future time to
preserve some image and shadow more faithfully than by words; but I
shall at present terminate our series of illustrations by reference to a
work of less touching, but more tremendous appeal; the Last Judgment in
the church of Santa Maria dell' Orto.'

'By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event been grappled with in its
verity; not typically, nor symbolically, but as they may see it who
shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one traditional circumstance he
has received with Dante and Michael Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned;
but the impetuosity of his mind bursts out even in the adoption of this
image; he has not stopped at the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at
the sweeping blow and demon-dragging of the other; but, seized
Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the
victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor
the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the
earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly
cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf
where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin
of nations, and the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling like
water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes, and caverns, and shadows of
the earth, the bones gather, and the clay-heaps heave, rattling and
adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and
struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their
clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet,
like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam pool; shaking
off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the
clangour of the trumpets of the armies of God; blinded yet more, as they
awake, by the white light of the new heaven, until the great vortex of
the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment-seat; the Firmament
is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that drifts, and
floats, and falls in the interminable, inevitable light; the bright
cl