artyrdom of St. Agnes." The first two are among his largest and
mightiest works, but grievously injured by damp and neglect; and
unless the traveller is accustomed to decipher the thoughts in a
picture patiently, he need not hope to derive any pleasure from them.
But no pictures will better reward a resolute study. The following
account of the "Last Judgment," given in the second volume of "Modern
Painters," will be useful in enabling the traveller to enter into the
meaning of the picture, but its real power is only to be felt by
patient examination of it.

"By Tintoret only has this unimaginable event (the Last Judgment) been
grappled with in its Verity; not typically nor symbolically, but as
they may see it who shall not sleep, but be changed. Only one
traditional circumstance he has received, with Dante and Michael
Angelo, the Boat of the Condemned; but the impetuosity of his mind
bursts out even in the adoption of this image; he has not stopped at
the scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon
dragging of the other, but, seized Hylas like by the limbs, and
tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his
destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that
bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of
the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of
the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has
melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruins of nations, and
the limbs of its corpses tossed out of its whirling, like
water-wheels. Bat-like, out of the holes and caverns and shadows of
the earth, the bones gather, and the clay heaps heave, rattling and
adhering into half-kneaded anatomies, that crawl, and startle, and
struggle up among the putrid weeds, with the clay clinging to their
clotted hair, and their heavy eyes sealed by the earth darkness yet,
like his of old who went his way unseeing to the Siloam Pool; shaking
off one by one the dreams of the prison-house, hardly hearing the
clangor of the trumpets of the armies of God, blinded yet more, as
they awake, by the white light of the new Heaven, until the great
vortex of the four winds bears up their bodies to the judgment seat;
the Firmament is all full of them, a very dust of human souls, that
drifts, and floats, and falls into the interminab