Each melted into other.”
Read the story of the three transformations for yourself (Cantos xxiv., xxv.), and then note the main point of all, that the spirit of such theft is especially indicated by its intense and direct manner of blasphemy:—
“I did not mark,
Through all the gloomy circle of the abyss,
Spirit that swelled so proudly ’gainst its God,
Not him who headlong fell from Thebes.”
The soul is Vanni Fucci’s, who rifled the sacristy of St. James of Pistoja, and charged Vanni della Nona with the sacrilege, whereupon the latter suffered death. For in those days, death was still the reward of sacrilege by the Law of State; whereas, while I write this Fors, I receive notice of the conjunction of the sacred and profane civic powers of London to de-consecrate, and restore to the definitely pronounced ‘unholy’ spaces [[388]]of this world, the church of All-Hallows, wherein Milton was christened.
A Bishop was there to read, as it were, the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or at least address it to the Devil instead of to God, to pray that over this portion of British Metropolitan territory His Kingdom might again come.
A notable sign of the times,—completed, in the mythical detail of it, by the defiance of the sacred name of the Church, and the desecration of good men’s graves,[6] lest, perchance, the St. Ursulas of other lands should ever come on pilgrimage, rejoicing, over the sea, hopeful to see such holy graves among the sights of London.
Infinitely ridiculous, such travelling as St. Ursula’s, you think,—to see dead bodies, forsooth, and ask, with every poor, bewildered, Campagna peasant, “Dov’ è San Paolo?” Not at all such the object of modern English and American tourists!—nay, sagacious Mr. Spurgeon came home from his foreign tour, and who more proud than he to have scorned, in a rational manner, all relics and old bones? I have some notes by me, ready for February, concerning the unrejoicing manner of travel adopted by the sagacious modern tourist, and his objects of contemplation, for due comparison with St. Ursula’s; [[389]]but must to-day bring her lesson close home to your own thoughts.