A work-woman, friends, she, no less than a princess; and princess most in being so.  In like manner, is a picture by a Florentine, whose mind I would fain have you know somewhat, as well as Carpaccio’s—­Sandro Botticelli—­the girl who is to be the wife of Moses, when he first sees her at the desert well, has fruit in her left hand, but a distaff in her right.[2]

“To do good work, whether you live or die,” it is the entrance to all Princedoms; and if not done, the day will come, and that infallibly, when you must labour for evil instead of good.

    Fors Clavigera (Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent, 1872).

FOOTNOTES: 

[2] More accurately a rod cloven into three at the top, and so holding the wool.  The fruit is a bunch of apples; she has golden sandals, and a wreath of myrtle round her hair.

THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS

(RUBENS)

EUGENE FROMENTIN

Many people say Antwerp; but many also say the country of Rubens, and this mode of speech more exactly expresses all the things that constitute the magic of the place:  a great city, a great personal destiny, a famous school, and ultra-celebrated pictures.  All this is imposing, and our imagination becomes excited rather more than usual when, in the centre of the Place Vert, we see the statue of Rubens and, farther on, the old basilica where are preserved the triptychs which, humanly speaking, have consecrated it.

The statue is not a masterpiece; but it is he, in his own home.  Under the form of a man, who was nothing but a painter, with the sole attributes of a painter, in perfect truth it personifies the sole Flemish sovereignty which has neither been contested nor menaced, and which certainly never will be.

[Illustration:  THE DESCENT FROM THE CROSS.
        Rubens.]

At the end of the square is seen Notre Dame; it presents itself in profile, being outlined by one of its lateral faces, the darkest one, on account of the rains beating on that side.  It is made to look blacker and bigger by being surrounded with light and low buildings.  With its carved stonework, its rusty tone, its blue and lustrous roof, its colossal tower where the golden disk and the golden needles of its dial glitter in the stone discoloured by the vapours from the Scheldt and by the winters, it assumes monstrous proportions.  When the sky is troubled, as it is to-day, it adds all its own strange caprices to the grandeur of the lines.  Imagine then the invention of a Gothic Piranesi, exaggerated by the fancy of the North, wildly illuminated by a stormy day, and standing out in irregular blotches against the scenic background of a sky entirely black or entirely white, and full of tempest.  A more original or more striking preliminary stage-setting could not be contrived.  Thus it is vain for you to have come from Mechlin or Brussels, to have seen the Magi and the Calvary, to have formed an exact and measured idea of Rubens, or even to have taken familiarities in examining him that have set you at your ease with him, for you cannot enter Notre Dame as you enter a museum.