272 PRÆTERITA-II

of the façade, and the entirely vile taste and vapid design of the interior. We walked round it, saw the mosaic copies of pictures we did not care for, the pompous tombs of people whose names we did not know, got out to the fresh air and fountains again with infinite sense of relief, and never again went near the place, any of us, except to hear music, or see processions and paraphernalia.

33. So we went home to lunch, and of course drove about the town in the afternoon, and saw the Forum, Coliseum, and so on. I had no distinct idea what the Forum was or ever had been, or how the three pillars, or the seven, were connected with it, or the Arch of Severus, standing without any road underneath, or the ragged block of buildings above, with their tower of the commonest possible eighteenth-century type. There was, however, one extreme good in all this, that I saw things, with whatever faculty was in me, exactly for what they were; and though my religious instruction, as aforesaid, led me to suppose the malaria in the Campagna was the consequence of the Papacy, that did not in the least affect my clear and invincible perception that the outline of Soracte was good, and the outlines of tufa and pozzolana foregrounds bad, whether it was Papal or Protestant pozzolana. What the Forum or Capitol had been, I did not in the least care; the pillars of the Forum I saw were on a small scale, and their capitals rudely carved, and the houses above them nothing like so interesting as the side of any close in the “Auld toun” of Edinburgh.¹

34. Having ascertained these general facts about the city and its ruins, I had to begin my gallery work. Of

¹ [The MS. has the following additional passage here:-

“And I saw also that the whole thing as it was, considered as a picture subject, was a vile discord and wretchedness. I could draw the choir of Bolton Abbey with its wild fresh grass over the altar, and the banks of Wharfe seen through its traceriless window, in entire peace and pensiveness of mind and eye-profited, there, by all I could see or think. But if only a few buttresses had been left of one side of it-and the back of a block of modern houses built on the foundation of the other-adieu, alike, meditation or work at Bolton Abbey-and the Capitol was simply this, with bad columns left instead of good buttresses. Having ascertained ...”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]