354 ST. MARK’S REST

the faithful, but now put behind, and comparatively dim beside the glory of present and personal vision. Yet the light which comes even through the square window streams through bars like those of a prison.

‘Through the body’s prison-bars

His soul possessed the sun and stars,’

Dante Rossetti writes of Dante Alighieri;¹ but Carpaccio hangs the wheels of all visible heaven inside these bars. St. Jerome’s ‘possessions’ are in a farther country. These bars are another way of putting what is signified by the brown cape.

VIII. “The two great volumes leaning against the wall by the arm-chair are the same thing, the closed testaments.

IX. “The documents hanging in the little chamber behind and lying at the saint’s feet, remarkable for their hanging seals, are shown by these seals to be titles to some property, or testaments; but they are now put aside or thrown underfoot. Why, except that possession is gotten, that Christ is risen, and that ‘a testament is of no strength at all while the testator liveth’?² This I believe is in misuse of Paul’s words, but an employment of them in their mystic sense, just as the New Testament writers quoted the Old Testament. There is a very prominent illuminated R on one of the documents under the table (I think you have written of it as Greek in its lines):³ I cannot but fancy it is the initial letter of ‘Resurrectio.’ What the music is, Caird⁴ has sent me no information about; he was to inquire of some friend who knew about old church music. The prominent bell and shell on the table puzzle me, but I am sure mean something. Is the former the mass-bell?

X. “The statuettes of Venus and the horse, and the various antique fragments on the shelf behind the arm-chair

¹ [“Dante at Verona.”]

² [Hebrews ix. 17.]

³ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 61, § 9.]

⁴ [For Mr. Caird, see Vol. XXIII. p. lxi. The music is set out in Ludwig and Molmenti’s Vittore Carpaccio, La Vita e Le Opere, 1906, pp. 175-178.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]