348 ST. MARK’S REST

To whom, nevertheless, all the charity of George Sand, and all the ingenuity of Mr. Sterling, and all the benevolence of Mr. Wilberforce, and a great quantity, if we knew it, of the daily comfort and peace of our own little lives every day, are verily owing; as to a lovely old pair of spiritual spectacles, without whom we never had read a word of the “Protestant Bible.” It is of no use, however, to begin a life of St. Jerome now-and of little use to look at these pictures without a life of St. Jerome; but only thus much you should be clear in knowing about him, as not in the least doubtful or mythical, but wholly true, and the beginning of facts quite limitlessly important to all modern Europe-namely, that he was born of good, or at least rich family, in Dalmatia,¹ virtually midway between the east and the west; that he made the great Eastern book, the Bible, legible in the west; that he was the first great teacher of the nobleness of ascetic scholarship and courtesy, as opposed to ascetic savageness: the founder, properly, of the ordered cell and tended garden, where before was but the desert and the wild wood; and that he died in the monastery he had founded at Bethlehem.

179. It is this union of gentleness and refinement with noble continence,-this love and imagination illuminating the mountain cave into a frescoed cloister, and winning its savage beasts into domestic friends, which Carpaccio has been ordered to paint for you; which, with ceaseless exquisiteness of fancy, he fills these three canvases with the incidents of,-meaning, as I believe, the story of all monastic life, and death, and spiritual life for evermore: the power of this great and wise and kind spirit, ruling in the perpetual future over all household scholarship; and the help rendered by the companion souls of the lower creatures to the highest intellect and virtue of man.²

¹ [At Stridonia (see Bible of Amiens, iii. § 34), about 346; died 420.]

² [In some notes on St. Jerome among Ruskin’s papers, is the following account of the legend of St. Jerome and the lion from the English translation (first printed by Caxton in 1483) of Jacobus de Voragine: “On a daye towarde even Jherome satte with his brethern for to here the holy lesson, and a lyon came haltynge sodaynly in to the monasterye, and when the brethern sawe hym anone they

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