IV. ST. MARK’S 129

we are very apt to think that we can make him an artist by teaching him anatomy, and how to draw with French chalk; whereas the real gift in him is utterly independent of all such accomplishments: and I believe there are many peasants on every estate, and labourers in every town, of Europe, who have imaginative powers of a high order, which nevertheless cannot be used for our good, because we do not choose to look at anything but what is expressed in a legal and scientific way. I believe there is many a village mason who, set to carve a series of Scripture or any other histories, would find many a strange and noble fancy in his head, and set it down, roughly enough indeed, but in a way well worth our having. But we are too grand to let him do this, or to set up his clumsy work when it is done; and accordingly the poor stonemason is kept hewing stones smooth at the corners, and we build our church of the smooth square stones, and consider ourselves wise.

§ 62. I shall pursue this subject farther in another place;¹ but I allude to it here in order to meet the objections of those persons who suppose the mosaics of St. Mark’s, and others of the period, to be utterly barbarous as representations of religious history. Let it be granted that they are so; we are not for that reason to suppose they were ineffective in religious teaching. I have above spoken of the whole church as a great Book of Common Prayer;² the mosaics were its illuminations, and the common people of the time were taught their Scripture history by means of them, more impressively perhaps, though far less fully, than ours are now by Scripture reading. They had no other Bible, and-Protestants do not often enough consider this-could have no other. We find it somewhat difficult to furnish our poor with printed Bibles; consider what the difficulty must have been when they could be given only in manuscript. The walls of the church

¹ [See below, ch. vi. §§ 11-24, and see, in Vol. XII., Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 43, and the letter to Acland in The Oxford Museum (Arrows of the Chace, 1880, i. 199).]

² [Above, § 46, p. 112.]

X. I

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