enumerate the various offices of charity as so many separate
virtues; more frequently arranged as seven distinct works of mercy. This
general tendency to a morbid accuracy of classification was associated,
in later times, with another very important element of the Renaissance
mind, the love of personification; which appears to have reached its
greatest vigor in the course of the sixteenth century, and is expressed
to all future ages, in a consummate manner, in the poem of Spenser. It
is to be noted that personification is, in some sort, the reverse of
symbolism, and is far less noble. Symbolism is the setting forth of a
great truth by an imperfect and inferior sign (as, for instance, of the
hope of the resurrection by the form of the phoenix); and it is almost
always employed by men in their most serious moods of faith, rarely in
recreation. Men who use symbolism forcibly are almost always true
believers in what they symbolize. But Personification is the bestowing
of a human or living form upon an abstract idea: it is, in most cases, a
mere recreation of the fancy, and is apt to disturb the belief in the
reality of the thing personified. Thus symbolism constituted the entire
system of the Mosaic dispensation: it occurs in every word of Christ's
teaching; it attaches perpetual mystery to the last and most solemn act
of His life. But I do not recollect a single instance of personification
in any of His words. And as we watch, thenceforward, the history of the
Church, we shall find the declension of its faith exactly marked by the
abandonment of symbolism,[144] and the profuse employment of
personification,--even to such an extent that the virtues came, at last,
to be confused with the saints; and we find in the later Litanies, St.
Faith, St. Hope, St. Charity, and St. Chastity, invoked immediately
after St. Clara and St. Bridget.

Sec. LVI. Nevertheless, in the hands of its early and earnest masters, in
whom fancy could not overthrow the foundations of faith, personification
is, often thoroughly noble and lovely; the earlier conditions of it
being just as much more spiritual and vital than the later ones, as the
still earlier symbolism was more spiritual than they. Compare, for
instance, Dante's burning Charity, running and returning at the wheels
of the chariot of God,--

"So ruddy, that her form had scarce
Been known within a furnace of clear flame,"

with Reynolds's Charity, a nurse in a white dress, c