274 PRÆTERITA-II

opposition of the Parnassus to the Disputa, shown, in The Stones of Venice,* to foretell the fall of Catholic Theology.

35. The main wonders of Rome thus taken stock of, and the course of minor sight-seeing begun, we thought it time to present a letter of introduction which Henry Acland had given me to Mr. Joseph Severn.

Although in the large octavo volume containing the works of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats, which so often lay on my niche-table at Herne Hill,¹ the Keats part had never attracted me, and always puzzled, I had got quite enough perception of his natural power, and felt enough regret for his death, to make me wait with reverence on his guardian friend. I forget exactly where Mr. Severn lived at that time, but his door was at the right of the landing at the top of a long flight of squarely reverting stair,-broad, to about the span of an English lane that would allow two carts to pass; and broad-stepped also, its gentle incline attained by some three inches of fall to a foot of flat. Up this I was advancing slowly,-it being forbidden me ever to strain breath,-and was within eighteen or twenty steps of Mr. Severn’s door, when it opened, and two gentlemen came out, closed it behind them with an expression of excluding the world for evermore from that side of the house, and began to descend the stairs to meet me, holding to my left. One was a rather short, rubicund, serenely beaming person; the other, not much taller, but paler, with a beautifully modelled forehead, and extremely vivid, though kind, dark eyes.

36. They looked hard at me as they passed, but in

* I have authorized the republication of this book in its original text and form, chiefly for the sake of its clear, and the reader will find, wholly incontrovertible, statement of the deadly influence of Renaissance Theology on the Arts in Italy, and on the religion of the World.²

¹ [See above, p. 39 (§ 44).]

² [The reference to Stones of Venice above is a slip on Ruskin’s part for Lectures on Architecture and Painting: see Vol. XII. pp. 148, 149. The republication of the Stones in its original form was the edition of 1886: see Vol. IX. p. liv.]

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