In fact, in no instance could the saying, "preserve me from my own friends," be more aptly applied than in Ruskin's defence of the Gothic. For Ruskin was a conscientious student, and things which even enemies of his subject would be likely to overlook, he brings forward proudly and ingenuously, like a truculent mother presenting an ugly child to a friend, and with a broad smile in his forcible prose which sometimes throws even the experienced reader quite off his guard. Hippolyte Taine speaks of the people of the Middle Ages as being possessed of delicate and over-excited imaginations, of morbid fancy unto whom vivid sensation--manifold, changing, bizarre and extreme --are necessary. In referring to their taste in ornament, he says, "It is the adornment of a nervous, over-excited woman, similar to the extravagant costumes of the day, whose delicate and morbid poesy denotes by its excess the singular sentiments, the feverish, violent, and impotent aspiration peculiar to an age of knights and monks."[27] [Illustration: The Canon of Polycleitus (_Rome_)] And if you think of the physical and spiritual operations they had been made to undergo, you will not feel very much inclined to question these conclusions. It must not be supposed that the canon of Polycletus, measuring seven heads, was transformed into the Byzantine canon, measuring nine heads, without some one's suffering--even though it took centuries to effect the change. It must not be believed that the calm Pagan idea of death was converted into the Christian terror of death without the sacrifice of something; nor must these emaciated, careworn, and neurotic faces in Mediæval paintings be conceived as mere inventions of morbid phantasy. The deeds of the body are not mortified through the Spirit with impunity. Such brilliant achievements have their accounts to pay, and the Church never once deceived itself or its followers as to what was paying, what was suffering, or where the amputations and vivisections were taking place. Look at the type of which the monks approved! Examine it in Cimabue's, Duccio's, Segna's and the Cologne painters' pictures. Examine it in the tapestry of Berne, known as the "Adoration of the Kings"; look at it in countless stained glass windows, and see its repetition in hundreds of illuminated manuscripts, some of which, like the Latin missal of the Church of St. Bavon at Ghent, and the _Lives of the Saints_ by Simeon Metaphrasi, have found their way into the British Museum.