II

“SUPER LEONEM ET ASPIDEM”¹

1. VENICE had become a great and a fair lady. The Knights of Christendom came to ask her to go crusading with them. She armed herself and went, and was their Britomart. They made her queen of the fourth part of the world they knew; and she went home and ordered her Greek servants to build her a palace. Who built it of marble and gold, and therein she lived in honour and beauty of justice, but was prouder and happier to be Queen of the Sea, than of the fourth part of the world. That is the brief myth or fairy symbol of the story of Venice in her mighty two hundred years-the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But without very true knowledge of the heart of these centuries there is no hope of your understanding the heart of their Sea-Queen; and even when you have partly gained sight of the mind of centuries, still the Sea-maid’s mind will be a mystery to you. You may look into the blue eyes of her for ever in vain, if unkindly: you will see nothing there but you the reflection of yourself, and the sea. But love her, ever so little, and you may see the celestial dayspring dawn within them, brighter as you answer it with heaven’s truth in your own.

The Heart of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: a likely thing to get you to imagine that-in these filthy streets of idle misery and encumbered wharvesful of rascality, the steel of Shylock’s knife made infinite in hell and beat into engine boilers. The Heart of them-no; but at least the outside form and moving frame of them, perhaps a little.

2. To begin with, there are two men whose lives you ought to learn separately-whom you should know, as you know Henry the Fifth of England, from birth to death-Frederic Barbarossa, and Robert Guiscard. But I can’t get a life of both of them, written for you by Carlyle, and must-well, I must get on, somehow. Look here, then. You have at this moment in Europe practically two collateral and equally splendid temporal powers. One, gradually gathering itself into a sense of human Justice and true divine Supremacy or Holy Empire over all the earth. Fastened, this, on more or less real-and better than real, noble imaginary-inheritance of the Empire of the Cæsars. Liable continually to mistake its own pride for inspiration, its own rage for justice, but on the whole representing a great Law of God. This is the German Empire, under Barbarossa, the crowns of Cæsar and Charlemagne, as it were of Karl and Kaiser,

¹ [The pages of MS. entitled as above are headed by Ruskin, “Six pages, beginning the second epoch; very valuable.” They connect, it will be seen, with the beginning of the present chapter v., and describe the opening of the second main period: see § 60 above, p. 254. For the title (Psalms xci. 13), and its significance in Venetian history, see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. (Vol. XI. p. 93) and compare Bible of Amiens, ch. iv. § 34.]

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