fleet-enriches his sailors with the confiscated spoils of the pirate Franks; then, feeling himself strong enough, lands at Dover, wins over the Roman Legions in England, and proclaims himself the Roman Emperor of England.1 27. This beginning of our worldly prosperity, at sea, then, is owing to the Franks; not to Rome at all. But our Christianity and our civic prosperity from 306 to 409 are altogether owing to Rome, and under the authority of Rome; only reflecting back to her our own fresh spiritpower. Think of it! Constantine was crowned at York in 306. His mother, an innkeeper's daughter by the shore of Hellespont: his father, a Dacian mountaineer: he himself born in the very midst of Northern Macedon-the race of the Danube and the Scamander mixed,-the "come over into Macedonia and help us brought now over into Britain indeed; and, from this piece of British plain, carried back to Byzantium. 28. Then, note that during these 143 years of following State Christianity in Britain, the whole work of St. Jerome is done at Rome and Bethlehem. He was a youth at Julian's death in 363, and died at Bethlehem, 30th September, 420. Antony in Egypt is 305-370; Ulphilas in Moesia, 360. So that you have these years of Britain's own Christian pride,-briefly, the fourth century and onethird of the fifth,-founding monastic life all through the East, and fixing, for West and East alike, the Canon of station in the north,-Bononia Oceanensis, "Bologna of the Sea," as distinguished from the Bologna of Italy, is its proper name. I see, however, that the Emperor Claudius is spoken of as having sailed for Britain from it. It was first fortified by Pedius, Julius Cæsar's grandnephew and legate in Gaul; who is said to have been born at Bologna, and to have planned some resemblance in the upper walled town to his own native one. Caligula built its first lighthouse, which was still standing in the seventeenth century (Histoire des Villes de France 4). 1 [See for § 26, Gibbon, ch. xiii.; vol. ii. pp. 120-123.] 3 Acts xvi. 9.] XXXIII. [A. Guilbert, Histoire des Villes de France, 1845, vol. ii. p. 98.] P the Bible. And all this, before a Saxon syllable is heard in British air. [Here Ruskin's completed MS. ends. The following pages are Mr. Collingwood's reconstruction (in Verona and other Lectures) of the remainder of the chapter:-] The missing pages-leading up the story to the point at which the Author meant to break off, in order to recommence, in his next chapter, with the history of the Anglo-Saxon Church-can be partly reconstructed from the Author's rough notes, from which it seems that, after showing at some length how much we in this island owe to foreign influence-our navy, for example, to the Franks, and our Church to Rome, in the first instance, he was going to recur to the Pelagian heresy, as not only a proof of island vigour and characteristic independence, but also as the occasion for the sending by Pope Celestine of Palladius, as first bishop of the Scots of Ireland and the Hebrides. This at once localises the story in the north-west, and forms a link between Scottish Christianity and Rome, in spite of the disclaimer of those who would like to believe in an original British Church, anti-Roman from the beginning. The next topic was to have been the mission of St. Germain of Auxerre and St. Loup of Troyes, another link between our country and Roman Gaul "St. Loup, a scholar of the great college of Lerins, who for the fifty years of his pontificate at Troyes was recognized through France as the most polished of scholars, and earnestly kind of prelates, 'the Father of Fathers, the Bishop of Bishops, the prince of the prelates of Gaul, the rule of manners, the pillar of Truth, the friend of God.'"2 Their legend, and the story of the Alleluia victory, which the Author has noted for description, can be read in Bede (book i. chapters 17-20). The Author meant to return, in conclusion, to the end of the fourth century, and to St. Ninian, "a most reverend bishop and holy man of the British nation,” says Bede (book iii. chap. 4), "who had been regularly instructed at Rome in the faith and mysteries of the truth; whose episcopal see, named after St. Martin, the bishop"-whom he had visited and corresponded with -"and famous for a stately church, wherein he and many other saints rest in the body, is still in existence among the English nation. The place belongs to the province of the Bernicians, and is generally called The White House, because there he built a church of stone, which is not usual among the Britons." With which assemblage of pregnant associations-linking together Ninian, our north-country patron of churches and holy-wells, with far-away Rome; and the Roman pilgrim with Wandering Willie's country-side by Solway shore; and wild Galloway in the dark ages with wonderful St. Martin of Tours; and the familiar ruins of Whithorn with the first glimmer, in Gaul, and Britain, and the islands seen through the sea-fog, of all the Lamps of Architecture-with this bouquet, so to speak, of poetical ideas, thus gathered together, the story was to pause at Candida Casa. 2 [See above, § 8; p. 210.] [Sidonius Apollinaris, quoted by Montalembert, Monks of the West, vol. i. p. 471; for the mission of St. Loup to Great Britain (A.D. 429), see ibid., vol. iii. p. 17. The sentence in inverted commas is here added from Ruskin's notes.] II MENDING THE SIEVE; OR, CISTERCIAN ARCHITECTURE (Read, as a lecture, at the London Institution, December 4, 1882)1 1. AMONG the circumstances of my early life which I count most helpful, and for which I look back with more than filial gratitude to my father's care, was his fixed habit of stopping with me, on his business journeys, patiently at any country inn that was near a castle, or an abbey, until I had seen all the pictures in the castle, and explored, as he always found me willing enough to do, all the nooks of the cloister. In these more romantic expeditions, aided and inspired by Scott, and never weary of re-reading the stories of The Monastery, The Abbot, and The Antiquary, I took 2 [In the abstract of this lecture in The Art Journal, the following introductory remarks are reported : "In answer to a very warm welcome, he addressed a few words to his audience, assuring them of his pleasure in being back amongst them, and expressing his sorrow that his health did not permit him to appear there more frequently. He had, he said, to apologise to them, first for not saying more on that matter, and secondly, for the change, already announced, in the title of his lecture. As to the first, he had meant to deliver an extempore speech to them, and had spent half the morning writing it; but he found it wouldn't be learnt by heart, and so—well, it must be forgiven him. Then as to the change of title: the lecture was to have been on Crystallography,' and now it was to be on Cistercian Architecture.' He had changed the title, and would have apologised more, only a certain newspaper had had a consolatory paragraph on the subject, in which it had said that all his titles were equally good for all his lectures; nobody could tell from any of them what was coming, and so one did as well as another. There was some truth, too, in it after all, for the Crystallography' lecture would have said a good deal about 'Cistercian Architecture,' and as for the present lecture, he had found great difficulty, and really had to exercise no little self-denial, to keep it off Crystallography.' Not that there was much in it about 'Cistercian Architecture' either. Those who knew his writings would know that to him the 'stones of Citeaux' would be interesting only as they expressed the minds and souls of their builders, and so it ought not to surprise some of his hearers to find a lecture by him on 'Cistercian Architecture' dealing mainly with the Cistercians themselves."] [Compare Præterita, i. §§ 5, 6.] an interest more deep than that of an ordinary child; and received impressions which guided and solemnized the whole subsequent tenor of my life. 2. One error there was, and one only, in the feeling with which these scenes were interpreted to me. For though I was bred in the strictest principles of Calvinism, my father and mother were both too well-informed to look without reverence on the vestiges of early Catholic religion in Britain nor did they ever speak of it in dishonourable terms, or cast doubt on the sincerity of the faith which had founded our fairest cathedrals, and consecrated our bravest kings. But, in common with most English people of their day, they were suspicious of the Monastic as distinguished from the Clerical power; and it was an inevitable consequence, that, as we descended from the hillsides of Yorkshire, or the Lothians, into the sweet meadows beside their pebbly streams, and saw the cattle resting in the shadows of Jedburgh or Bolton, it should have been pointed out to me, not without a smile, how careful the monks had been to secure the richest lands of the district for their possession, and the sweetest recesses of the vale for their shelter. 3. Nor was Scott himself without some share in the blame of this gravely harmful misrepresentation. I cannot but regard with continually increasing surprise, the offence which was taken by the more zealous members of the Scottish Church, at what they imagined Scott's partiality to Catholicism. The fact really is that every heroic, graceful, and intelligent virtue is attributed by him at every period of the Reformation to the sincere disciples of Presbyterian doctrine, but that, on the contrary, he has been content to portray the Catholic faith only in its corruption or its depression.' Finding material enough, and that of 1 [The MS. has the following further passage : 66 ... its depression, or its weakness, and in the characters of Abbots Ingilram and 'Boniface in The Monastery, of Lord Glenallan's mother and of his confessor in The Antiquary, of the Abbess of St. Hilda and her assessors in Marmion, and of the whole body of the Knights Templars in the most tractable kind, in the picturesque and pathetic oppositions of the Cameronian and Cavalier, the Puritan and Catholic, the mountaineer and dalesman, he gave in the stories of Waverley, Rob Roy, Old Mortality, Redgauntlet, Nigel, Peveril, and The Abbot, a series of realizations which are, respecting their several periods, the best historical painting yet done in Europe. But the libraries and old bookstalls of Edinburgh seldom threw a parchment in his way which would give him clue to the realities of human life before the fifteenth century; his conception of more remote periods, coloured by the partialities of his heart, and discoloured by the dulnesses of scholastic history, dwelt rather on the military than the missionary functions of British Christianity. The crozier and the cowl become with him little more than paraphernalia of the theatre, to relieve in richer chiaroscuro its armour and plumage; and the final outcome and effective conclusion of all his moonlight reveries in St. Mary's aisle,' was but, for himself and for his reader, that "The Monks of Melrose made gude kale I am going to ask you to consider with me, this evening, whether, admitting such to be the fact, the monks of Tweeddale were altogether to be blamed, or ridiculed, for Ivanhoe and The Talisman, he gave a series of pictures which complied with every prejudice of his countrymen, and were discreditable to his own genius and scholarship not only by the vulgarity of their colouring, but in their unconsidered violations of historical accuracy. "Unconsidered, observe, I say with emphasis and asseveration. Scott is never malignant; never, consciously, a partizan, even in politics, still less in religion. But he is liable to be carried too far by the imagination, to which he assigned no graver task than to amuse his readers, and not to carry far enough the antiquarian research which he followed with scarcely other purpose than to amuse himself. Wherein not caring usually, except for the sake of Wallace or Bruce, to pass beyond the day of Elizabeth and the Queen of Scots, and finding material enough For Boniface, see The Monastery, passim, and for Ingilram (his predecessor), chaps. x. and xxxvii.; the reference to Marmion is to canto ii. ("The Convent"). Scott's treatment of Catholicism, compare, below, p. 512.] 1 [See The Lay of the Last Minstrel, the first lines of canto ii.] For 2 [See Scott's Abbot (ch. xvi.): quoted also in The Oxford Museum, Vol. XVI. p. 230.] |