are
ready to hear him forthwith. "You saw that? you felt that? No matter for
your being a child; let us hear."

Sec. XXXVI. Consider that every generation of men stands in this relation
to its successors. It is as the schoolboy: the knowledge of which it is
proudest will be as the alphabet to those who follow. It had better make
no noise about its knowledge; a time will come when its utmost, in that
kind, will be food for scorn. Poor fools! was that all they knew? and
behold how proud they were! But what we see and feel will never be
mocked at. All men will be thankful to us for telling them that.
"Indeed!" they will say, "they felt that in their day? saw that? Would
God we may be like them, before we go to the home where sight and
thought are not!"

This unhappy and childish pride in knowledge, then, was the first
constituent element of the Renaissance mind, and it was enough, of
itself, to have cast it into swift decline: but it was aided by another
form of pride, which was above called the Pride of State; and which we
have next to examine.

Sec. XXXVII. II. PRIDE OF STATE. It was noticed in the second volume of
"Modern Painters," p. 122, that the principle which had most power in
retarding the modern school of portraiture was its constant expression
of individual vanity and pride. And the reader cannot fail to have
observed that one of the readiest and commonest ways in which the
painter ministers to this vanity, is by introducing the pedestal or
shaft of a column, or some fragment, however simple, of Renaissance
architecture, in the background of the portrait. And this is not merely
because such architecture is bolder or grander than, in general, that of
the apartments of a private house. No other architecture would produce
the same effect in the same degree. The richest Gothic, the most massive
Norman, would not produce the same sense of exaltation as the simple
and meagre lines of the Renaissance.

Sec. XXXVIII. And if we think over this matter a little, we shall soon
feel that in those meagre lines there is indeed an expression of
aristocracy in its worst characters; coldness, perfectness of training,
incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men,
blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency. All these characters are
written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven
on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in
them that common men ca