X. THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES 339

glance, yet patiently, this warmth will resolve itself into a kind of chequering, as of an Eastern carpet, or old-fashioned English sampler, of more than usually broken and sudden variegation; nay, suggestive here and there of a wayward patchwork, verging into grotesqueness, or even, with some touch of fantasy in masque, into harlequinade,-like a tapestry for a Christmas night in a home a thousand years old, to adorn a carol of honoured knights with honouring queens.

166. Thus far sentient of the piece, for all is indeed here but one,-go forward a little, please, to the second picture on the left, wherein, central, is our now accustomed friend, St. George: stiff and grotesque, even to humorousness, you will most likely think him, with his dragon in a singularly depressed and, as it were, water-logged, state. Never mind him, or the dragon, just now: but take a good opera-glass, and look therewith steadily and long at the heads of the two princely riders on the left-the Saracen king and his daughter-he in high white turban, she beyond him in the crimson cap, high, like a castle tower.

Look well and long. For truly,-and with hard-earned and secure knowledge of such matters, I tell you, through all this round world of ours, searching what the best life of it has done of brightest in all its times and years,-you shall not find another piece quite the like of that little piece of work, for supreme, serene, unassuming, unfaltering sweetness of painter’s perfect art. Over every other precious thing, of such things known to me, it rises, in the compass of its simplicity; in being able to gather the perfections of the joy of extreme childhood, and the joy of a hermit’s age, with the strength and sunshine of mid-life, all in one.

Which is indeed more or less true of all Carpaccio’s work and mind; but in this piece you have it set in close jewellery, radiant, inestimable.

167. Extreme joy of childhood, I say. No little lady in her first red shoes,-no soldier’s baby seeing himself in the glass beneath his father’s helmet, is happier in laugh

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