It is written in a series of some eighteen to twenty pictures, chiefly representing the stories of St. Ursula, St. George, and St. Jerome. The first, in thoughtful order, of these, the dream of St. Ursula, has been already partly described in Fors; (August, 1872, p. 14). The authorities of the Venetian Academy have been kind enough to take the picture down and give it me to myself, in a quiet room, where I am making studies, which I hope will be of use in Oxford, and elsewhere. But there is this to be noted before we begin; that of these three saints, whose stories Carpaccio tells, one is a quite real one, on whose penman’s work we depend for our daily Bible-bread. Another, St. George, is a very dimly real one,—very disputable by American faith, and we owe to him, only in England, certain sentiments;—the Order of the Garter, and sundry sign-boards of the George and Dragon. Venice supposed herself to owe more to him; but he is nevertheless, in her mind also, a very ghostly saint,—armour and all too light to sink a gondola. Of the third, St. Ursula, by no industry of my good scholars, and none has been refused, can I find the slightest material trace. Under scholarly investigation, she vanishes utterly into the stars and the æther,—and literally, as you will hear, and see, into moonshine, and the modern German meaning of everything,—the Dawn. [94] Not a relic, not a word remains of her, as what Mr. John Stuart Mill calls “a utility embodied in a material object.” The whole of her utility is Immaterial—to us in England, immaterial, of late years, in every conceivable sense. But the strange thing is that Carpaccio paints, of the substantial and indisputable saint, only three small pictures; of the disputable saint, three more important ones; but of the entirely ærial saint, a splendid series, the chief labour of his life. The chief labour;—and chief rest, or play, it seems also: questionable in the extreme as to the temper of Faith in which it is done. We will suppose, however, at first, for your better satisfaction, that in composing the pictures he no more believed there ever had been a Princess Ursula than Shakspeare, when he wrote Midsummer Night’s Dream, believed there had been a Queen Hippolyta: and that Carpaccio had just as much faith in angels as Shakspeare in fairies—and no more. Both these artists, nevertheless, set themselves to paint, the one fairies, the other angels and saints, for popular—entertainment, (say your modern sages,) or popular—instruction, it may yet appear. But take it your own way; and let it be for popular amusement. This play, this picture which I am copying for you, were, both of them we will say, toys, for the English and Venetian people. Well, the next question is, whether the English and Venetians, when they could be amused with these toys, were more foolish than now, when they can only be amused with steam merry-go-rounds.