One can imagine the priest of such a violated sanctuary stealing back in the quiet moonlight, when all the mob fury had passed away, seeking amid all the wrack of fallen columns, and shattered carvings, for any poor fragments of god or goddess at whose tranquil fair-ordered altar he had ministered so long; and gathering such as he might find,—­maybe a mighty hand, still the hand of a god, albeit in overthrow, or some marble curls of the sculptured ambrosial locks, or maybe the bruised breast of the goddess, white as a water-lily in the moon.  Then, seeking out some secret corner of the sacred grove, how reverently he would bury the precious fragments away from profane eyes, and go forth homeless into a mysterious changing world, from which glory and loveliness were thus surely passing away.  Other priests, as we know, more fortunate than he, had forewarnings of such impending sacrilege, and were able to anticipate the mob, and bury their beautiful images in safe and secret places, there to await, after the lapse of twelve centuries, the glorious resurrection of the Renaissance.  A resurrection, however, by no means free from danger, even in that resplendent dawn of intelligence; for Christianity was still the enemy of beauty, save in the Vatican, and the ignorant priest of the remote village where the spade of the peasant had revealed the sleeping marble was certain to declare the beautiful image an evil spirit, and have it broken up forthwith and ground for mortar, unless some influential scholar, or powerful lord touched with “the new learning,” chanced to be on hand to save it from destruction.  Yes! even at that time when beauty was being victoriously born again, the mad fear of her raged with such panic in certain minds that, when Savonarola lit his great bonfire so subtle a servant of beauty as Botticelli, fallen into a sort of religious dotage, cast his own paintings into the flames—­to the lugubrious rejoicings of the sanctimonious Piagnoni—­as Savonarola’s followers were called; predecessors of those still gloomier zealots who, two centuries later, were to turn England into a sort of whitewashed prison, with crop-headed psalm-singing religious maniacs for gaolers.  When Charles the First

          bow’d his comely head
       Down, as upon a bed,

at Whitehall, Beauty also laid her head upon the block at his side.  Ugliness, parading as piety, took her place, and once more the breaking of images began, the banishment of music, the excommunication of grace, and gentle manners, and personal adornments.  Gaiety became penal, and a happy heart or a beautiful smile was of the devil,—­something like hanging matters—­but happy hearts and beautiful smiles must have been rare things in England during the Puritan Commonwealth.  Such as were left had taken refuge in France, where men might worship God and Beauty in the same church, and where it was not necessary, as at Oxford, to bury your stained-glass windows out of the reach of the mob—­those