432 APPENDIX

crossed on his brow. With this, necessary to this, opponent to it in healthy storm as the wind to blue sky, you have the animal spirit of errant chivalry, essentially semi-brutal. A centaur’s, not a man’s, but with all the good of the man and the horse in it. Corrupt, it is mere piracy and frantic slaughter, as the imperial power, corrupt, is deliberate slaughter. You can study nothing rightly in the rottenness of it. But study the emperor in Rudolph of Hapsburg and Barbarossa, and the outlaw in Robert Guiscard and Cœur de Lion, and you will get clue to the power of all.¹

3. Cœur de Lion an outlaw! Yes, outlaw of outlaws, one of the wildest of them, rebellious to the death against his own father, and against his own laws. Killed in a mere thieves’ foray for a pot of money.² But a goodly Norman knight for all that.

There have been only two real historians (to my thinking) since Herodotus-Shakespeare and Walter Scott. Neither are entirely to be trusted as to dates, or even material facts. Even Thucydides is only a chronicler, a useful sort of person, but not an historian. But once understand Shakespeare’s Cæsar, Henry the Fifth, and John of Gaunt; once understand Scott’s Marmion, King James, Cœur de Lion, Saladin, and Robin Hood, and after that you may read the chronicles of the great ages, and see your way into them for yourself, and learn here and there a thing or two, which Shakespeare indeed knew, but didn’t think it wise to talk of, and which Scott wouldn’t know, and always looked the other way when he passed the door.

4. You have your grand Norman Rider, then, in the south and west; your Central Earthly Empire in the north. Here in Italy, abiding against them, Hot St. Peter and Maid Venice, whom you are very likely to understand, are not you, my dear good Protestant Materfamilias, putting your best bonnet on to go to the sermon for the Bible Society in the great saloon of the Grand Hotel at eleven o’clock, and wondering whether the Duchess is going, and how much you ought to put in the plate?

[Here the MS. becomes memoranda, Ruskin referring to passages in his Venetian diary. These record the scene on the Lido when the Venetian force was assembled for the Fourth Crusade (1201): “Twenty-five thousand men, the best Knights and best Christians in the world, tented on the Lido with mind to recover the grave of Christ. Out of this you will make, O modern reader-what dirty thoughts you can! Yes, in the hearts of these men, no doubt, as in yours and mine, much dirt. Any quantity, indeed, you may find to eat if you like the dish-frantic ambition, mere cock-of-the-game pugnacity, pure robber’s lust of gold-not a little of women, and sneaking treachery at the bottom of-say, how many will you say-seven souls out of the twelve? five men honest in the dozen? Three? Two? Well, say one only, you nineteenth-century born rogue: that one was enough to lead them to victory.”]

¹ [For other references to Rudolph, see above, p. 137, and Vol. XVI. p. 190; for Barbarossa (Frederic I.), Vol. XIX. p. 392 n.; for Robert Guiscard, above, pp. 270, 274; and for Cœur de Lion, General Index.]

² [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 3, § 14.]

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