X. THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES 359

forget how the “worship of the golden calf” according to C. C., and “Moses” according to my note (and I believe the inscription, for most of, if not all, the subjects are inscribed with the names of the persons represented), are relatively pourtrayed. But I have not forgotten, and beg my reader to note specially, the exquisite strangeness of the boy’s rendering of the meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. One would have expected the Queen’s retinue, and her spice-bearing camels, and Solomon’s house and his servants, and his cup-bearers in all their glory; and instead of this, Solomon and the Queen stand at the opposite ends of a little wooden bridge over a ditch, and there is not another soul near them,-and the question seems to be which first shall set foot on it!

193. Now, what can we expect in the future of the man or boy who conceives his subjects, or is liable to conceive them, after this sort? There is clearly something in his head which we cannot at all make out; a ditch must be to him the Rubicon, the Euphrates, the Red Sea,-Heaven only knows what! a wooden bridge must be Rialto in embryo. This unattended King and Queen must mean the pre-eminence of uncounselled royalty, or what not; in a word, there’s no saying, and no criticizing him; and the less, because his gift of colour and his enjoyment of all visible things around him are so intense, so instinctive, and so constant, that he is never to be thought of as a responsible person, but only as a kind of magic mirror which flashes back instantly whatever it see beautifully arranged, but yet will flash back commonplace things often as faithfully as others.

194. I was especially struck with this character of his, as opposed to the grave and balanced design of Luini, when after working six months with Carpaccio, I went back to the St. Stephen at Milan, in the Monastero Maggiore.¹ In

¹ [San Maurizio, or Monastero Maggiore, where Ruskin had spent many weeks in the study of Luini in 1862: see Vol. XIX. p. lxxiii. The figure in the fresco (in the third chapel) which Ruskin identifies as St. Stephen (below, § 198) is generally called St. Laurence.]

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