sanctity of private capital.  Now, no official worth his salt can watch the shadow being recklessly sacrificed to the substance without itching to set the police on somebody; and the vigilance and sagacity of Byzantine civilians has become proverbial.  We learn from a letter written by Pope Gregory II to the Emperor Leo, the iconoclast, that men were willing to give their estates for a picture.  This, to Pope, Emperor, and Mr. Finlay the historian, was proof enough of appalling demoralisation.  For a parallel, I suppose, they recalled the shameful imprudence of the Magdalene.  There were people at Constantinople who took art seriously, though in a rather too literary spirit—­“dicunt enim artem pictoriam piam esse.”  This sort of thing had to be stopped.  Early in the eighth century began the iconoclast onslaught.  The history of that hundred years’ war, in which the popular party carried on a spirited and finally successful resistance, does not concern us.  One detail, however, is worth noticing.  During the iconoclast persecution a new popular art makes its appearance in and about those remote monasteries that were the strongholds of the mystics.  Of this art the Chloudof Psalter is the most famous example.  Certainly the art of the Chloudof Psalter is not great.  A desire to be illustrative generally mars both the drawing and the design.  It mars, but does not utterly ruin; in many of the drawings something significant persists.  There is, however, always too much realism and too much literature.  But neither the realism nor the literature is derived from classical models.  The work is essentially original.  It is also essentially popular.  Indeed, it is something of a party pamphlet; and in one place we see the Emperor and his cabinet doing duty as a conclave of the damned.  It would be easy to overrate the artistic value of the Chloudof Psalter, but as a document it is of the highest importance, because it brings out clearly the opposition between the official art of the iconoclasts that leaned on the Hellenistic tradition and borrowed bluntly from Bagdad, and the vital art that drew its inspiration from the Christian movement and transmuted all its borrowing into something new.  Side by side with this live art of the Christian movement we shall see a continuous output of work based on the imitation of classical models.  Those coarse and dreary objects that crop up more or less frequently in early Byzantine, Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, and early Italian art, are not, however, an inheritance from the iconoclastic period; they are the long shadow thrown across history by the gigantic finger of imperial Rome.  The mischief done by the iconoclasts was not irreparable, but it was grave.  True to their class, Byzantine officials indulged a taste for furniture, giving thereby an unintentional sting to their attack.  Like the grandees of the Classical Renaissance, they degraded art, which is a religion, to upholstery, a menial trade.  They