well as your love. I am not patient, and four years is a long time time to wait."

And again he pleaded, as only lovers plead, that she would consent to marry him at

once.

"Dear Maurice," said Marguerite, "do not tempt me any more. If there were nothing else to prevent it, I could never leave my father."

"I wish I had never determined to go to Italy," said Maurice, gloomily.

But after a while he brightened at the picture Marguerite drew of his successful career abroad, and his triumphant return, and grew sanguine and happy as before; while Marguerite stifled her own regrets, and thought only of cheering and encouraging her lover. "And you are not a bit afraid that I shall forget you among the beautiful Italian signor inas ?" asked Maurice, gaily.

"Not a bit, Maurice," and Marguerite smiled brightly. "I am yours now, and you are mine, and I know we shall always belong to each other; though I must wonder all my life how your fastidious taste could pardon your poor Marguerite her want of beauty!"

Maurice knew nothing of Emerson's "Hermione," or he might have remembered the opening lines of that exquisite little poem,

"If it be, as they said, she was not fair, Beauty's not beautiful to mebut he told her passionately that she was to him the ideal of all that was good and lovely on earth; and now as he gazed on her face, always so sweet, yet so noble in its expression, he beheld it radiant with the glow of happy love, and the light of that genius which in all moments of intense feeling shone through her features: it was little wonder that she seemed fair in his eyes. Others besides a lover might have thought her so.

N

CHAPTER VII.

WHAT CHRISTIAN KNELLER SAID.

OTHING could exceed Christian Knel

ler's surprise when he learned that Marguerite had promised to be Maurice Valaze's wife as soon as he returned from Rome. Never very observant, his perceptions in this case were blunted by his belief that Marguerite was unchangeably wedded to art and would never give any other bridegroom a claim on her devotion, and his silent conviction that the world did not contain any one worthy of her-if such a one might be found, Maurice Valazé was certainly not the man.

"My poor little Marguerite," he said, after the first surprise was over, "after all, thy heart is as soft as that of any other girl, and thou hast fallen in love with Maurice's handsome face and sweet words. But art thou sure thou dost really love him? does not deserve it."

He

"Father, I thought you liked Maurice," exclaimed Marguerite.

"And so I do. He is a good fellow, a. pleasant companion, full of fine fancies, and with a rare gift of words; but the firm will, the large intellect, the great soul, without which I used to think no attractions could win my Marguerite's proud heart, he possesses not. I'll tell thee what, he has the true soul of a troubadour, and he ought to have been a singer of songs, instead of a painter of pictures. Like the old Provençal trouvères, he is brave, gay, generous, ready of hand and word, frank, courteous, and gentle; but like them, too, he is light, weak, fickle—”

"Father, father," cried Marguerite, starting up as if an arrow had pierced her heart, "how can you say such cruel things?—how can you believe them? You do not know Maurice. He has the finest mind, the loftiest genius, the noblest aims in life that man could have. But you do not mean what you have said; you cannot have so misunderstood his glorious and beautiful nature.”

"Enough, child, enough," said Christian Kneller, with a heavy sigh; "I see thou dost indeed love him. If he does not change his mind in Italy, let him be thy husband in God's name; and if he loves and prizes thee only half as much as thy old father, thou mayest not be unhappy after all."

"Oh, he does love me," exclaimed Marguerite, coming back to her father again and sitting down beside him; "he will love me and prize me even as much as you could wish, dear father." And persuading herself that it was his dread of losing her that had made the good old man for once in his life unjust, she

told him with her loving heart beaming in her happy eyes, that she would never leave him, and that Maurice had promised they should all live together in the dear old house, from which, and all its associations, she well knew her father could never have borne to be separated.

Christian Kneller said little in reply; but he smoked his pipe quietly, and let Marguerite weave her bright fancies of future bliss unchecked, and Marguerite was perfectly happy.

To be continued.

ries, were eminently unfavourable to its highest development. It was not, like pagan art, the æsthetic exponent of a dominant religion; enjoying the patronage of the great and wealthy; adorning the numerous temples of the gods and the palaces and banquet chambers of emperors and senators; commemorating the virtues of patriots and heroes, and bodying forth the conceptions of poets and seers. There was no place in the Christian system for such representations as the glorious sun-god, Apollo, or the lovely Aphrodite, or the sublime majesty of Jove, which are still the unapproached chefs d'œuvre of the sculptor's skill. The beautiful myths of Homer and Hesiod were regarded with abhorrence; and the Christian. converts from paganism shrank, as from sacrilege, from any representation of the supreme object of their worship.

Nevertheless the testimony of the catacombs gives evidence that art was not, as has frequently been asserted, entirely abjured by the primitive believers on account of its idolatrous employment by the pagans. They rather adopted and purified it for Christian purposes, just as they did the diverse elements of ancient civilization. It was not till the increasing power and growing opulence of the Church, led to the more lavish employment of art, that it called forth the condemnation of the Fathers of the third and fourth centuries.

The art of any age is an outgrowth and efflorescence of an internal living principle; and as is the tree so is its fruit. The iconography of the early centuries of Christianity is, therefore, a pictorial history of its devel

mas, the strifes of heresiarchs and schismatics are all reflected therein. The frescoes of the catacombs are illustrations, inestimable in value, of the pure and lofty character of that primitive Christianity of which they were the offspring. The very intensity of that old Christian life under repression and persecution created a more imperious necessity for religious symbolism, as an expression of its deepest feelings, and as a common sign of the faith. Early Christian art, therefore, was not realistic and sensuous, but ideal and spiritual. Of the unknown artists of the catacombs, no less than those of the Rénaissance, may it be said:

"They never moved their hand Till they had steeped their inmost soul in prayer."

The decoration of these subterranean crypts is the first employment of art by the early Christians of which we have any remains. A universal instinct leads us to beautify the sepulchres of our departed. This is seen alike in the rude funereal totem of the American savage, in the massive mausolea of the Appian Way, and in the magnificent Moorish tombs of the Alhambra. It is not, therefore, remarkable that the primitive Christians adorned, with religious paintings, expressive of their faith and hope, the graves of the dead, or in times of persecution traced upon the martyr's tomb the crown and palm, the emblems of victory, or the dove and olive branch, the beautiful symbol of peace.

It must not, however, be supposed that the first beginnings of Christian art were rude and formless essays, such as we see among barbarous tribes. The primitive be

lievers had not so much to create the principles of art as to adapt an art already fully developed to the expression of Christian thought. Like the neophyte converts from heathenism, pagan art had to be baptized into the service of Christianity. "The germs of a new life," says Dr. Lübke, "were in embryo in the dying antique world. Ancient art was the garment in which the young and world-agitating ideas of Christianity were compelled to veil themselves."* Hence the earlier paintings are superior in execution, and manifest a richness, a vigour, and a freedom like those of the best specimens of the classic period. Their design is more correct, their ornamentation more chaste and elegant, and the accessories more graceful than in the later examples. These shared the gradual decline which characterized the art of the decaying empire, becoming more impoverished in conception, stiff in manner, and conventional and hieratic in type, till they sink into the barbarism of the Byzantine age.

The art of the catacombs thus sprang out of that which was pre-existing, selecting and adapting what was congenial in spirit, and rigorously rejecting whatever savoured of idolatry or of the sensual character of ancient heathen life. As Christianity was diametrically opposed to paganism in spirit, so its art was singularly free from pagan error. There were no wanton dances of nude figures like those upon the walls of that exhumed Roman Sodom, Pompeii, but chaste pictures with figures clothed from head to foot; or where historical accuracy required the representation of the undraped form, as in pictures of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, or of the story of Jonah, they were instinct with modesty and innocence. Pagan art, a genius with drooping wing and torch reversed, stood at the door of death but cast no light upon the world beyond. Christian

History of Art, by Dr. Wilhelm Lübke, vol. i., p. 275. This admirable book is one of the most recent and authoritative works on this subject.

art, inspired with lofty faith, pierced through the veil of sense-beyond the shadows of time-and saw the pure spirit rising from the grave, "as essence from an alembic, in which all the grosser qualities of matter have remained." Hence only images of hope and tender joy are employed. There is no symptom of the despair of paganism, scarce even of natural sorrow.

Independent statues were, in the first ages, rarely if ever used. There seemed to be greater danger of falling into error by the imitation of these the forms in which were most of the representations of the heathen deities-than in the employment of plastic art. The fabrication of these, therefore, was especially avoided; and in nothing is the contrast between ancient Christianity and the Roman Catholicism of later days more striking than in the profusion of “graven imagery" in the latter compared with its entire absence in the former. Indeed sculpture never became truly Christian, and even in the hands of an Angelo or a Thorwaldsen failed to produce triumphs of skill like those of Phidias or Praxiteles. Christian plastic art, however, in its noblest development, far surpassed even the grandest achievements, of which we have any account, of the school of Apelles and Zeuxis. Christianity is the glorification of the gentler graces, paganism of the sterner virtues. The former finds its best expression in painting, the latter in sculpture.

Primitive Christianity was eminently congenial to religious symbolism. Born in the East and in the bosom of Judaism, which had long been familiar with this universal Oriental language, it adopted types and emblems as its natural mode of expression.* They formed the warp and woof of the symbolic drapery of the tabernacle and temple service, pre-figuring the great truths of the Gospel. The Old Testament sparkles with