X. THE SHRINE OF THE SLAVES 367

Gloria [576], cannot by any effort of imagination be connected with the figure of the young girl kneeling for the Pope’s blessing in 577.

204. But indeed had the story been as consistently told as the accessories are perfectly painted, there would have been no occasion for me now to be lecturing on the beauties of Carpaccio. The public would long since have discovered them, and adopted him for a favourite. That, precisely in the particulars which would win popular attention, the men whom it would be most profitable for the public to study should so often fail, becomes to me, as I grow older, one of those deepest mysteries of life, which I only can hope to have explained to me when my task of interpretation is ended.

But, for the sake of Christian charity, I would ask every generous Protestant to pause for a while before the meeting under the Castle of St. Angelo (577).

“Nobody knows anything about those old things,” said an English paterfamilias to some inquiring member of his family, in the hearing of my assistant, then at work on this picture. Which saying is indeed supremely true of us nationally. But without requiring us to know anything, this picture puts before us some certainties respecting mediæval Catholicism, which we shall do well to remember.

In the first place, you will find that all these bishops and cardinals are evidently portraits. Their faces are too varied-too quiet-too complete-to have been invented by even the mightiest invention. Carpaccio was simply taking the features of the priesthood of his time, throwing aside, doubtless, here and there, matter of offence;-the too settled gloom of one, the evident subtlety of another, the sensuality of a third; but finding beneath all that, what was indeed the constitutional power and pith of their minds,-in the deep of them, rightly thoughtful, tender, and humble.

There is one curious little piece of satire on the fault of the Church in making cardinals of too young persons. The third, in the row of four behind St. Ursula, is a mere boy,

[Version 0.04: March 2008]