346 ST. MARK’S REST

A lovely picture, in every sense and power of painting; natural, and graceful, and quiet, and pathetic;-divinely religious, yet as decorative and dainty as a bank of violets in spring.

176. But the next picture!¹ How was ever such a thing allowed to be put in a church? Nothing surely could be more perfect in comic art. St. Jerome, forsooth, introducing his novice lion to monastic life, with the resulting effect on the vulgar monastic mind.

Do not imagine for an instant that Carpaccio does not see the jest in all this, as well as you do,-perhaps even a little better. “Ask for him to-morrow, indeed, and you shall find him a grave man;”² but, to-day, Mercutio himself is not more fanciful, nor Shakespeare himself more gay in his fancy of “the gentle beast and of a good conscience,” than here the painter as he drew his delicately smiling lion with his head on one side like a Perugino’s saint, and his left paw raised, partly to show the thorn wound, partly in deprecation,-

“For if I should, as lion, come in strife

Into this place, ’twere pity of my life.”³

The flying monks are scarcely at first intelligible but as white and blue oblique masses; and there was much debate between Mr. Murray and me, as he sketched the picture for the Sheffield Museum,⁴ whether the actions of flight were indeed well given or not; he maintaining that the monks were really running like Olympic archers, and that the fine drawing was only lost under the quartering of the dresses:-I on the contrary believe that Carpaccio had failed, having no gift for representing swift motion. We are probably both right; I doubt not that the running action, if Mr. Murray says so, is rightly drawn; but at this

¹ [The upper subject on Plate LXIV.]

² [Romeo and Juliet, Act iii. sc. 1.]

³ [Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v. sc. 1.]

⁴ [See above, Introduction, p. lv.]

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