struck a deeper note, a wider chord, than previous essays; it
was the forecast of the last volume of "Modern Painters," and it
sketched the train of thought into which he had been led during his tour
abroad, that summer.

The battles between faith and criticism, between the historical and the
scientific attitudes, which had been going on in his mind, were taking a
new form. At the outset, we saw, naturalism overpowered respect for
tradition--in the first volume of "Modern Painters;" then the historical
tendency won the day, in the second volume. Since that time, the
critical side had been gathering strength, by his alliance with liberal
movements and by his gradual detachment from associations that held
him to the older order of thought. As in his lonely journey of 1845
he first took independent ground upon questions of religion and social
life, so in 1858, once more travelling alone, he was led by his
meditations,--freed from the restraining presence of his parents--to
conclusions which he had been all these years evading, yet finding at
last inevitable.

He went abroad for a third attempt to write and illustrate his History
of Swiss Towns. He spent part of May on the Upper Rhine between Basle
and Schaffhausen, June and half of July on the St. Gothard route and at
Bellinzona. In reflecting over the sources of Swiss character, as
connected with the question of the nature of art and its origin in
morality, he was struck with the fact that all the virtues of the Swiss
did not make them artistic. Compared with most nations they were as
children in painting, music and poetry. And, indeed, they ranked with
the early phases of many great nations--the period of pristine
simplicity "uncorrupted by the arts."

From Bellinzona he went to Turin on his way to the Vaudois Valleys,
where he meant to compare the Waldensian Protestants with the Swiss.
Accidentally he saw Paul Veronese's "Queen of Sheba" and other Venetian
pictures; and so fell to comparing a period of fully ripened art with
one of artlessness; discovering that the mature art, while it appeared
at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay,
but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age. He grasped a clue to
the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human
happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of
pleasure. But when the turning point of national progress is once
reached, and art is regarded as the lab