394 ST. MARK’S REST

quotation from Plato above, the dragon’s thorny plumage; compare, too, the charger’s mane and tail, and the rippling glory that crown St. George. It is worth while, too, to have in mind the words of the “black cherub” that had overheard the treacherous counsel of Guido de Montefeltro. From the moment it was uttered, to that of the sinner’s death, the evil spirit says, “stato gli sono a crini”*-lord of his fate. Further, in a Venetian series of engravings illustrating Dante (published 1491), the fire-breathings of the Dragon on Cacus’ shoulders transform themselves into the Centaur’s femininely flowing hair, to signify the inspiration of his forceful fraud. This “power on his head” he has because of such an angel.† When we consider the Princess we shall find this symbolism yet further carried, but just now have to notice how the closely connected franchise of graceful motion, lost to those dishonoured ones, is marked by the most carefully-painted bones lying on the left-a thigh-bone dislocated from that of the hip, and then thrust through it. Curiously, too, such dislocation would in life produce a hump, mimicking fairly enough in helpless distortion that one to which the frog’s leaping power is due.‡

233. Centrally in the foreground is set the skull, perhaps of an ape, but more probably of an ape-like man, “with forehead villanous low.”¹ This lies so that its eye-socket looks out, as it were, through the empty eyehole of a sheep’s skull beside it. When man’s vision has become ovine merely, it shall at last, even of grass, see only such bitter and dangerous growth as our husbandman must reap with a spear from a dragon’s wing.

234. The remaining minor words of this poem in a forgotten tongue I cannot definitely interpret. The single skull with jaw-bone broken off, lying under the dragon’s

* Dante, Inf., XXVII.

† Ibid., Inf., XXV.

‡ Ariadne Florentina, § 111 [Vol. XXII. p. 367].

¹ [Tempest, Act iv. sc. 1.]

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