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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
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