And he must have a little more due even than this. It is not at all clear to me how far the Beggar and Pauper Saint, whose marriage with the Lady Poverty I have come here to paint from Giotto’s dream of it,—how far, I say, the mighty work he did in the world was owing to his vow of poverty, or diminished by it. If he had been content to preach love alone, whether among poor or rich, and if he had understood that love, for all God’s creatures, was one and the same blessing; and that, if he was right to take the doves out of the fowler’s hand, that they might build their nests, he was himself wrong when he went out in the winter’s night on the hills, and made for himself dolls of snow, and said, “Francis, these—behold—these are thy wife and thy children.” If instead of quitting his father’s trade, that he might nurse lepers, he had made his father’s trade holy and pure, and honourable more than beggary, perhaps at this day the Black Friars might yet have had an unruined house by Thames shore, and the children of his native village not be standing in the porches of the temple built over his tomb, to ask alms of the infidel. FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER XLII. I must construct my letters still, for a while, of swept-up fragments; every day provokes me to write new matter; but I must not lose the fruit of the old days. Here is some worth picking up, though ill-ripened for want of sunshine, (the little we had spending itself on the rain,) last year. 1st August, 1873. “Not being able to work steadily this morning, because there was a rainbow half a mile broad, and violet-bright, on the shoulders of the Old Man of Coniston—(by calling it half a mile broad, I mean that half a mile’s breadth of mountain was coloured by it,—and by calling it violet-bright, I mean that the violet zone of it came pure against the grey rocks; and note, by the way, that essentially all the colours of the rainbow are secondary;—yellow exists only as a line—red as a line—blue as a line; but the zone itself is of varied orange, green, and violet,)—not being able, I say, for steady work, I opened an old diary of 1849, and as the third Fors would have it, at this extract from the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. (Venice.) “The Prince of Saxony went to see the Arsenal three days ago, waited on by a numerous nobility of both sexes; the Bucentaur was adorned and launched, a magnificent collation given; and we sailed a little in it. I was in company with the Signora Justiniani Gradenigo and Signora Marina Crizzo. There were two cannons founded in his (the Prince of Saxony’s) presence, and a galley built and launched in an hour’s time.” (Well may Dante speak of that busy Arsenal!)