immense revenue to the country
which can show the most of such death chambers. Often by chance or
mistake one has wandered into a museum--though I confess I never
understood in what relation it stood to the Muses--where your scientist
has collected his scraps and refuse of Nature, things that were
wonderful or beautiful once--birds, butterflies, the marvellous life of
the foetus, and such--but that in his hands have died in order that he
may set them out and number them one by one. Here you will find a leg
that once stood firm enough, there an arm that once for sure held
someone in its embrace: now it is exposed to the horror and curiosity of
mankind. Well, it is the same with the Pictures and the statues. Why,
men have prayed before them, they have heard voices, tears have fallen
where they stood, and they have whispered to us of the beauty and the
love of God. To-day, herded in thousands, chained to the walls of their
huge dungeons, they are just specimens like the dead butterflies which
we pay to see, which some scientific critic without any care for beauty
will measure and describe in the inarticulate and bestial syllables of
some degenerate dialect he thinks is language. Our unfortunate gods! How
much more fortunate were they of the older world: Zeus, whose statue of
ivory and gold mysteriously was stolen away; Aphrodite of Cnidus, which
someone hid for love; and you, O Victory of Samothrace, that being
headless you cannot see the curious, peeping, indifferent multitude. Was
it for this the Greeks blinded their statues, lest the gods being in
exile, they might be shamed by the indifference of men? And now that our
gods too are exiled, who will destroy their images and their pictures
crowded in the museums, that the foolish may not speak of them we have
loved, nor the scientist say, such and such they were, in stature of
such a splendour, carved by such a man, the friend of the friend of a
fool? But our gods are dead.

FOOTNOTES:

[86] I give this story for what it is worth. So far as I know, however,
the font was placed in its present position in 1658, more than a hundred
years after the church was roofed in. It may, however, have occupied
another position before that.

[87] See p. 82.

[88] To compare an Italian church with a French cathedral would be to
compare two altogether different things, a fault in logic, and in
criticism the unforgivable sin; for a work of art must be judged in its
own category, and p