sed my beauty for what it has done, and cursed the wonder of my
body for the evil that it has brought upon you.

Lord, this man brought me to Thy feet. He told me of Thy coming upon
earth, and of the wonder of Thy birth, and the great wonder of Thy death
also. By him, O Lord, Thou wast revealed to me.

HONORIUS. You talk as a child, Myrrhina, and without knowledge. Loosen
your hands. Why didst thou come to this valley in thy beauty?

MYRRHINA. The God whom thou worshippest led me here that I might repent
of my iniquities and know Him as the Lord.

HONORIUS. Why didst thou tempt me with words?

MYRRHINA. That thou shouldst see Sin in its painted mask and look on
Death in its robe of Shame.

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART

'The English Renaissance of Art' was delivered as a lecture for the first
time in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of
it was reported in the New York Tribune on the following day and in other
American papers subsequently. Since then this portion has been
reprinted, more or less accurately, from time to time, in unauthorised
editions, but not more than one quarter of the lecture has ever been
published.

There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the
earliest of which is entirely in the author's handwriting. The others
are type-written and contain many corrections and additions made by the
author in manuscript. These have all been collated and the text here
given contains, as nearly as possible, the lecture in its original form
as delivered by the author during his tour in the United States.

Among the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of
Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the
most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special
manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver
before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of
beauty--any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the
philosophy of the eighteenth century--still less to communicate to you
that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a
particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but
rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great
English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is
pos