Now our own current writing, I told you, is to be equal in thickness of line. You will find that method the quickest and servicablest. But in quite beautiful writing, the power of the pen is to be exhibited with decision; and of its purest and delicatest exertion, you will see the result on the opposite page; facsimile by Mr. Burgess, coloured afterwards by hand, from a piece of Lombardic writing, of about the eleventh century,—(I shall not say where the original is, because I don’t want it to be fingered)—which the scribe has entirely delighted in doing, and of which every line and touch is perfect in its kind. Copy it, with what precision you can, (and mind how you put in the little blue dash to thicken the s of Fides,) for in its perfect uprightness, exquisite use of the diamond-shaped touches obtained by mere pressure on the point, and reserved administration of colour, it is a model not to be surpassed; standing precisely half-way between old Latin letters and mediæval Gothic. The legend of it is— “Fides catholica edita ab Athanasio Alexandrie sedis episcopo.” Towards the better understanding of which Catholic faith, another step may be made, if you will, by sending to Mr. Ward for the Etruscan Leucothea, [28] with Dionysus on her knees, which also stands just half-way in imagination, though only a quarter of the way in time, between the Egyptian Madonna, (Isis with Horus,) of fifteen hundred years before Christ, and the Florentine Madonna by Lippi, fifteen hundred years after Christ. Lippi, being true-bred Etruscan, simply raises the old sculpture into pure and sacred life, retaining all its forms, even to the spiral of the throne ornament, and the transgression of the figures on the bordering frame, acknowledging, in this subjection to the thoughts and laws of his ancestors, a nobler Catholic Faith than Athanasius wrote: faith, namely, in that one Lord by whose breath, from the beginning of creation, the children of men are born; and into whose hands, dying, they give up their spirit.