s of friars and clergy, relics
exposed for adoration, columns draped, altars illuminated, incense
smoking, organs pealing, and boxes of piping soprani, Swiss guards
with slashed breeches and fringed halberts;--between us and all this
splendour of old-world ceremony, there's an ocean flowing: and yonder
old statue of Peter might have been Jupiter again, surrounded by a
procession of flamens and augurs, and Augustus as Pontifex Maximus,
to inspect the sacrifices,--and my feelings at the spectacle had been,
doubtless, pretty much the same.

"Shall I utter any more heresies? I am an unbeliever in Raphael's
'Transfiguration'--the scream of that devil-possessed boy, in the lower
part of the figure of eight (a stolen boy too), jars the whole music
of the composition. On Michael Angelo's great wall, the grotesque and
terrible are not out of place. What an awful achievement! Fancy the
state of mind of the man who worked it--as alone, day after day, he
devised and drew those dreadful figures! Suppose in the days of the
Olympian dynasty, the subdued Titan rebels had been set to ornament a
palace for Jove, they would have brought in some such tremendous work:
or suppose that Michael descended to the Shades, and brought up this
picture out of the halls of Limbo. I like a thousand and a thousand
times better to think of Raphael's loving spirit. As he looked at women
and children, his beautiful face must have shone like sunshine: his
kind hand must have caressed the sweet figures as he formed them. If
I protest against the 'Transfiguration,' and refuse to worship at that
altar before which so many generations have knelt, there are hundreds of
others which I salute thankfully. It is not so much in the set harangues
(to take another metaphor), as in the daily tones and talk that his
voice is so delicious. Sweet poetry, and music, and tender hymns drop
from him: he lifts his pencil, and something gracious falls from it on
the paper. How noble his mind must have been! it seems but to receive,
and his eye seems only to rest on, what is great, and generous, and
lovely. You walk through crowded galleries, where are pictures ever so
large and pretentious; and come upon a grey paper, or a little fresco,
bearing his mark-and over all the brawl and the throng recognise his
sweet presence. 'I would like to have you been Giulio Romano,' J. J.
says (who does not care for Giulio's pictures), 'because then I would
have been Raphael's favourite pupil.