ADDRESSES ON DECORATIVE COLOUR 485

could only be appreciated by those who understood harmony of colour. It was not the extraordinary effects of the light and shade-beautiful though they were-that marked the true Titian, so much as the beautiful harmony of his colours; and by disciplining the eye to those harmonies a feeling would be created in the public mind which was now almost dead.

13. There was another advantage that would result from the rival of this art to the student and illuminator. He could not imagine a happier life than that which would be led by any person of quiet and studious habits with something like the disposition of the old monks who were the illuminators in past times, while following this occupation. If it were cultivated, a totally new impulse would be given to art in every direction, and possibly also to literature; for people would feel that it was better to have a monument in the shape of an illuminated book than in that of an illuminated window; and many a man engaged in writing a book would feel more interest in his work, and take more care in its composition, if he knew that it was to be beautifully illuminated, to be placed in a library as a beloved thing, to be handed down from father to son, and from generation to generation, than if it were printed in the ordinary way, tossed about and scattered all over the world with all the errors committed in it by printers’ devils, and thrown aside as soon as read. As showing the kind of life he would encourage, he would ask permission to read a passage from Longfellow, describing the Friar Pacificus transcribing and illuminating the Gospel of St. John:¹-

“It is growing dark! Yet one line more,

And then my work for to-day is o’er;

I come again to the name of the Lord!

Ere I that awful name record,

That is spoken so lightly among men,

Let me pause awhile, and wash my pen;

Pure from blemish and blot must it be

When it writes that word of mystery!

Thus have I laboured on and on,

Nearly through the Gospel of St. John.

Can it be that from the lips

Of this same gentle Evangelist,

That Christ himself perhaps has kissed,

Came the dread Apocalypse?

It has a very awful look,

As it stands there at the end of the book,

Like the sun in an eclipse.

Ah me! when I think of that vision divine,

Think of writing it, line by line,

I stand in awe of the terrible curse,

Like the trump of doom in the closing verse!

God forgive me! if ever I

Take aught from the book of that Prophecy;

Lest my part, too, should be taken away

From the Book of Life on the Judgment Day.”

¹ [The Golden Legend: iv., “The Scriptorium.” Compare Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xx. § 32, where Ruskin says that Longfellow, in The Golden Legend, “has entered more closely into the temper of the Monk, for good and for evil, than ever yet theological writer or historian.”]

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