480 PRÆTERITA-III

youth and age; which yet abides in all the mountain Catholic districts of Savoy, the Waldstetten, and the Tyrol, to their perpetual honour and peace; and this without controversy, or malice towards the holders of other beliefs.

6. Next, in 1845, I saw in Florence, as above told,¹ the interior economy of the monasteries at Santa Maria Novella, -in the Franciscan cloisters of Fésole, and in Fra Angelico’s, both at San Domenico and San Marco. Which, in whatever they retained of their old thoughts and ways, were wholly beautiful; and the monks with whom I had any casual intercourse, always kind, innocently eager in sympathy with my own work, and totally above men of the “world” in general understanding, courtesy, and moral sense.

Men of the outer world, I mean, of course,-official and commercial. Afterwards at Venice I had a very dear, and not at all monastic, friend, Rawdon Brown; but his society were the Venetians of the fifteenth century. The Counts Minischalchi at Verona, and Borromeo at Milan, would have been endlessly kind and helpful to me; but I never could learn Italian enough to speak to them. Whereas, with my monkish friends, at the Armenian isle of Venice, and in any churches or cloisters through North Italy, where I wanted a niche to be quiet in, and chiefly at last in Assisi,² I got on with any broken French or Italian I could stutter, without minding; and was always happy.

7. But the more I loved or envied the monks, and the more I despised the modern commercial and fashionable barbaric tribes, the more acutely also I felt that the Catholic political hierarchies, and isolated remnants of celestial enthusiasm, were hopelessly at fault in their dealing with these adversaries; having also elements of corruption in themselves, which justly brought on them the fierce hostility of men like Garibaldi in Italy,³ and of the honest

¹ [See above, p. 359.]

² [For Ruskin’s friendship with the Armenian monks at S. Lazzaro, and with the Franciscans at Assisi, see Vol. XXIII. p. xxxix.]

³ [Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter 7 (Vol. XXVII. p. 117).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]