Of which the essential power is that it can make a narrow stroke sideways, and a broad one when you press it open.
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 [[124]]faith, another step may be made, if you will, by sending to Mr. Ward for the Etruscan Leucothea,[4] 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.
This photograph of Etruscan art is therefore to be the second of our possessions, and means of study; affording us at once elements of art-practice in many directions, according to our strength; and as we began with drawing the beads of cap, and spiral of chair, in the Lippi, rather than the Madonna, so here it will be well to be sure we can draw the throne, before we try the Leucothea. Outline it first by the eye, then trace the original, to correct your drawing; and by the time [[125]]next Fors comes out, I hope your power of drawing a fine curve, like that of the back of this throne, will be materially increased; by that time also I shall have got spirals to compare with these Etruscan ones, drawn from shells only an hour or two old, sent me by my good friend Mr. Sillar, (who taught me the wrongness of the infinite spiral of money interest,) by which I am at present utterly puzzled, finding our conclusions in last Fors on this point of zoology quite wrong; and that the little snails have no less twisted houses than the large. But neither for drawing nor architecture is there to-day more time, but only to correct and clarify my accounts, which I have counted a little too far on my power of keeping perspicuous without trouble; and have thereby caused my subscribers and myself a good deal more than was needful.
Henceforward I must ask their permission, unless I receive definite instruction to the contrary, to give names in full, as the subscriptions come in, and give up our occult notation.
I am not quite so well pleased with my good friend Mr. Girdlestone’s pamphlet on luxury as I was with that on classification of society, though I am heartily glad to be enabled by him to distribute it to my readers, for its gentle statements may be more convincing than my impatient ones. But I must protest somewhat against their mildness. It is not now merely dangerous, but criminal, to teach the lie that the poor [[126]]live by the luxury of the rich. Able men—even Pope himself—have been betrayed into thinking so in old times, (blaming the luxury, however, no less,) but the assertion is now made by no intelligent person, unless with the deliberate purpose of disguising abuses on which all the selfish interests of society depend.