ody, would also travel a little in soul! We
think it a great triumph to get our packages and our persons carried at
a fast pace, but we never take the slightest trouble to put any pace
into our perceptions; we stay usually at home in thought, or if we ever
mentally see the world, it is at the old stage-coach or waggon rate. Do
but consider what an odd sight it would be, if it were only quite clear
to you how things are really going on--how, here in England, we are
making enormous and expensive efforts to produce new art of all kinds,
knowing and confessing all the while that the greater part of it is bad,
but struggling still to produce new patterns of wall-papers, and new
shapes of teapots, and new pictures, and statues, and architecture; and
pluming and cackling if ever a teapot or a picture has the least good in
it;--all the while taking no thought whatever of the best possible
pictures, and statues, and wall-patterns already in existence, which
require nothing but to be taken common care of, and kept from damp and
dust: but we let the walls fall that Giotto patterned, and the canvases
rot that Tintoret painted, and the architecture be dashed to pieces that
St. Louis built, while we are furnishing our drawing-rooms with prize
upholstery, and writing accounts of our handsome warehouses to the
country papers. Don't think I use my words vaguely or generally: I speak
of literal facts. Giotto's frescoes at Assisi are perishing at this
moment for want of decent care; Tintoret's pictures in San Sebastian, at
Venice, are at this instant rotting piecemeal into grey rags; St.
Louis's chapel, at Carcassonne, is at this moment lying in shattered
fragments in the market-place. And here we are all cawing and crowing,
poor little half-fledged daws as we are, about the pretty sticks and
wool in our own nests. There's hardly a day passes, when I am at home,
but I get a letter from some well-meaning country clergyman, deeply
anxious about the state of his parish church, and breaking his heart to
get money together that he may hold up some wretched remnant of Tudor
tracery, with one niche in the corner and no statue--when all the while
the mightiest piles of religious architecture and sculpture that ever
the world saw are being blasted and withered away, without one glance of
pity or regret. The country clergyman does not care for _them_--he has a
sea-sick imagination that cannot cross channel. What is it to him, if
the angels of Assisi