VI. THE CAMPO SANTO 349

measured by the criticism of the Cathedral of Rheims in my Don Juan journal of 1835:-

“The carving is not rich,-the Gothic heavy,

The statues miserable; not a fold

Of drapery well-disposed in all the bevy

Of Saints and Bishops and Archbishops old

That line the porches grey. But in the nave I

Stared at the windows purple, blue, and gold:

And the perspective’s wonderfully fine

When you look down the long columnar line.”¹

By the “carving” I meant the niche work, which is indeed curiously rude at Rheims; by the “Gothic” the structure and mouldings of arch, which I rightly call “heavy” as compared with later French types; while the condemnation of the draperies meant that they were not the least like those either of Rubens or Roubilliac. And ten years had to pass over me before I knew better; but every day between the standing in Rheims porch and by Ilaria’s tomb had done on me some chiselling to the good; and the discipline from the Fontainebleau time² till now had been severe. The accurate study of tree branches, growing leaves, and foreground herbage, had more and more taught me the difference between violent and graceful lines; the beauty of Clotilde and Cécile, essentially French-Gothic, and the living Egeria of Araceli,³ had fixed in my mind and heart, not as an art-ideal, but as a sacred reality, the purest standards of breathing womanhood; and here suddenly, in the sleeping Ilaria, was the perfectness of these, expressed with harmonies of line which I saw in an instant were under the same laws as the river wave, and the aspen branch, and the stars’ rising and setting; but treated with a modesty and severity which read the laws of nature by the light of virtue.⁴

¹ [See Vol. II. p. 401.]

² [See above, p. 314.]

³ [Miss Tollemache (Mrs. Cowper-Temple); “of Araceli,” because he saw her at a service in that church at Rome: see above, pp. 277, 278, and Vol. XXXIII. pp. 191-192.]

⁴ [For another account of the effect of the statue of Ilaria upon him, as also for this journey generally, see the Epilogue of 1883 to the second volume of

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