the painter's own time, as his saintly predecessor, the
Gaudioso of the earlier century here commemorated, had done after the
invasion of the Goths. The eloquent eyes are open upon some glorious
vision. "He hath made us kings and priests!" they seem to say for him,
as the clean, sensitive lips might do so eloquently. Beauty and
Holiness had "kissed each other," as in Borgognone's imperial deacons
at the Certosa. At the Renaissance the world might seem to have parted
them again. But here certainly, once more, Catholicism and the
Renaissance, religion and culture, holiness and beauty, might seem
reconciled, by one who had conceived neither after any feeble way, in a
gifted person. Here at least, by the skill of Romanino's hand, the
obscure martyr of the crypts shines as a [108] saint of the later
Renaissance, with a sanctity of which the elegant world itself would
hardly escape the fascination, and which reminds one how the great
Apostle Saint Paul has made courtesy part of the content of the Divine
charity itself. A Rubens in Italy!--so Romanino has been called. In
this gracious presence we might think that, like Rubens also, he had
been a courtier.

NOTES

90. *Published in the New Review, Nov. 1890, and now reprinted by the
kind permission of the proprietors.

NOTRE-DAME D'AMIENS*

[109] THE greatest and purest of Gothic churches, Notre-Dame d'Amiens,
illustrates, by its fine qualities, a characteristic secular movement
of the beginning of the thirteenth century. Philosophic writers of
French history have explained how, in that and in the two preceding
centuries, a great number of the more important towns in eastern and
northern France rose against the feudal establishment, and developed
severally the local and municipal life of the commune. To guarantee
their independence therein they obtained charters from their formal
superiors. The Charter of Amiens served as the model for many other
communes. Notre-Dame d'Amiens is the church of a commune. In that
century of Saint Francis, of Saint Louis, they were still religious.
But over against monastic interests, as identified with a central
authority--king, emperor, or pope--they pushed forward the local, and,
so to call it, secular authority of their [110] bishops, the flower of
the "secular clergy" in all its mundane astuteness, ready enough to
make their way as the natural Protectors of such townships. The people
of Amiens, for instance, under a powe