“Rarus,” it is true, can also mean thin; but here it means only rare, seldom appearing, and is applied to Fidelity herself, not to her clothing. Spence would have been right, had the poet said, “Fides raro velata panno.” Thirdly, Horace is said to have elsewhere called faith or honesty transparent, in the sense in which friends protest to one another, “I wish you could read my heart.” This meaning is said to be found in the line of the eighteenth ode of the First Book: Arcanique Fides prodiga, pellucidior vitro. How can a critic allow himself to be thus misled by a word? Is a faith, “arcani prodiga,” lavish of secrets, faithfulness? is it not rather faithlessness? And it is of faithlessness, in fact, that Horace says, “She is transparent as glass, because she betrays to every eye the secrets entrusted to her.” Note 29, p. 71. Apollo delivers the washed and embalmed body of Sarpedon to Death and Sleep, that they may bring him to his native country. (Iliad, xvi. 681, 682.) πέμπε δέ μιν πομποῖσιν ἅμα κραιπνοῖσι φέρεσθαι, Ὕπνῳ καὶ Θανάτῳ διδυμάοσιν. Caylus recommends this idea to the painter, but adds: “It is a pity that Homer has given us no account of the attributes under which Sleep was represented in his day. We recognize the god only by his act, and we crown him with poppies. These ideas are modern. The first is of service, but cannot be employed in the present case, where even the flowers would be out of keeping in connection with the figure of Death.” (Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée d’Homère, et de l’Enéide de Virgile, avec des observations générales sur le costume, à Paris, 1757–58.) That is requiring of Homer ornamentations of that petty kind most at variance with the nobility of his style. The most ingenious attributes he could have bestowed on Sleep would not have characterized him so perfectly, nor have brought so vivid a picture of him before us, as the single touch which makes him the twin brother of Death. Let the artist seek to express this, and he may dispense with all attributes. The old artists did, in fact, make Sleep and Death resemble each other, like twin-brothers. On a chest of cedar, in the Temple of Juno at Elis, they both lay as boys in the arms of Night. One was white, the other black; one slept, the other only seemed to sleep; the feet of both were crossed. For so I should prefer to translate the words of Pausanias (Eliac. cap. xviii. p. 422, edit. Kuhn), ἀμφοτέρους διεστραμμένους τοὺς πόδας, rather than by “crooked feet,” as Gedoyn does, “les pieds contrefaits.” What would be the meaning of crooked feet? To lie with crossed feet is customary with sleepers. Sleep is thus represented by Maffei. (Raccol. Pl. 151.) Modern artists have entirely abandoned this resemblance between Sleep and Death, which we find among the ancients, and always represent Death as a skeleton, or at best a skeleton covered with skin.