beneath his feet, the murmur of hell against him heard by his spiritual ear like the winding of a shell on the far off Te sea shore.

It is vain to attempt to pursue the comparison; the two orders of art have in them nothing common, and § 21. Conthe field of sacred history, the intent and scope clusion. of Christian feeling, are too wide and exalted to admit of the juxtaposition of any other sphere or order of conception; they embrace all other fields like the dome of heaven. With what comparison shall we compare the types of the martyr saints; the St. Stephen of Fra Bartolomeo,' with his calm. forehead crowned by the stony diadem, or the St. Catherine of Raffaelle looking up to heaven in the dawn of the eternal day, with her lips parted in the resting from her pain; or with what the Madonnas of Francia and Pinturicchio,3 in whom the hues of the morning and the solemnity of eve, the gladness in accomplished promise, and sorrow of the sword-pierced heart, are gathered into one human Lamp of

* I will put no depreciatory comments under the honest canticle with which a book I was so happy in writing is brought to a close; though I have long ceased to care for the Madonnas of Francia, and much prefer the St. Catherine of Luini 5 to that of Raffaelle, and feel the whole passage to read more like a piece of Mrs. Jameson 6 than of me. Perhaps I am none the better, if the wiser, in these changes of temperament: but they enable me, at all events, fully to ratify the useful censures in the following Addenda, given with the second edition of the old book, and which I conclude my editoral duty by commenting upon, at some length, in the "Epilogue." [1883.]

[As in the picture in the Cappella del Santuario of the cathedral at Lucca.] 2 [See above, sec. i. ch. xii. § 10, p. 159.]

3 [Ruskin may have been thinking especially of the Francia in the National Gallery: see above, p. 196 n. He had especially admired the Madonna by Pinturicchio in the Louvre, which he had noted in his 1844 diary as "exquisite and pure."] 4 [See Ethics of the Dust, § 87, where "Dora" asks the "Lecturer to "read the end of the second volume of Modern Painters," and he replies that he has changed his mind between 27 and 40; "but," he adds, "that second volume is very good for you as far as it goes. It is a great advance and a thoroughly straight and swift one, to be led, as it is the main business of that second volume to lead you, from Dutch cattle-pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra Angelico."]

5

[A favourite saint with Luini; see, for instance, the frescoes of the Monastero Maggiore (San Maurizio), Milan, the " Body of St. Catherine borne across the Sea to its Sepulchre" in the Brera, and the "St. Catherine of the Hermitage" (frontispiece to G. C. Williamson's Luini, 1899). For Ruskin's general estimate of Luini, see below, p. 355.]

6 [For Mrs. Jameson, see Præterita, ii. ch. vii. § 143.]

ineffable love? or with what the angel choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea, listening in the pauses of alternate song, for the prolonging of the trumpet blast, and the answering of psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep, and from all the star shores of heaven?1

1 [It is interesting to compare this passage with the first impression for it, which is given by Ruskin in a letter to his father:

"FLORENCE, June 5.-. . . I spent an hour and a half before a Fra Angelico [in the Uffizi], and hadn't enough of it neither. I learnt how ladies dance from Simone Memmi [in the Campo Santo at Pisa]; and I saw angels dancing to-day, and so I know how they do it. I wish you could see one of Angelico's, either dancing or singing. One that I saw to-day had just taken the trumpet from his lips, and with his hand lifted-listens to the blast of it passing away into heaven. And then to see another bending down to clash the cymbals, and yet looking up at the same instant all full of love. And their wings are of ruby colour and pure gold, and covered with stars, and each has a tongue of fire on his forehead, waving as he moves.'

With this "canticle" in praise of Fra Angelico, compare Ruskin's review of Lord Lindsay, On the Old Road, 1899, i. §§ 90-94.]