lo, had been, not pleasure, but knowledge;
not indolence, but ambition; and not love, but horror.

164. But when first I ventured to tell you this, I did not know, myself,
the fact of all most conclusive for its confirmation. It will take me a
little while to put it before you in its total force, and I must first
ask your attention to a minor point. In one of the smaller rooms of the
Munich Gallery is Holbein's painting of St. Margaret and St. Elizabeth
of Hungary,--standard of his early religious work. Here is a photograph
from the St. Elizabeth; and, in the same frame, a French lithograph of
it. I consider it one of the most important pieces of comparison I have
arranged for you, showing you at a glance the difference between true
and false sentiment. Of that difference, generally, we cannot speak
to-day, but one special result of it you are to observe;--the omission,
in the French drawing, of Holbein's daring representation of disease,
which is one of the vital honors of the picture. Quite one of the chief
strengths of St. Elizabeth, in the Roman Catholic view, was in the
courage of her dealing with disease, chiefly leprosy. Now observe, I say
_Roman_ Catholic view, very earnestly just now; I am not at all sure
that it is so in a Catholic view--that is to say, in an eternally
Christian and Divine view. And this doubt, very nearly now a certainty,
only came clearly into my mind the other day after many and many a
year's meditation on it. I had read with great reverence all the
beautiful stories about Christ's appearing as a leper, and the like; and
had often pitied and rebuked myself alternately for my intense dislike
and horror of disease. I am writing at this moment within fifty yards of
the grave of St. Francis, and the story of the likeness of his feelings
to mine had a little comforted me, and the tradition of his conquest of
them again humiliated me; and I was thinking very gravely of this, and
of the parallel instance of Bishop Hugo of Lincoln, always desiring to
do service to the dead, as opposed to my own unmitigated and
Louis-Quinze-like horror of funerals;--when by chance, in the cathedral
of Palermo, a new light was thrown for me on the whole matter.

165. I was drawing the tomb of Frederick II., which is shut off by a
grating from the body of the church; and I had, in general, quite an
unusual degree of quiet and comfort at my work. But sometimes it was
paralyzed by the unconscious interference of one of