Mr. Ruskin, in his petulant-playful way, has touched upon the feeling of amaze most people have who look for the first time at Botticelli’s Judith tripping smoothly and lightly over the hill-country, her steadfast maid dogging with intent patient eyes every step she takes.  You say it is flippant, affected, pedantic.  For answer, I refer you to the sage himself, who, from his point of view—­that painting may fairly deal with a chapter of history—­is perfectly right.  The prevailing strain of the story is the strength of weakness—­ex dulci fortitudo, to invert the old enigma.  “O God, O my God, hear me also, a widow.  Break down their stateliness by the hand of a woman!” It is the refrain that runs through the whole history of Israel, that reasonable complacency of a little people in their God-fraught destiny.  And, withal, a streak of savage spite:  that the audacious oppressor shall be done scornfully to death.  There is the motive of Jael and Sisera too.  So “she smote twice upon his neck with all her might, and she took away his head from him, and tumbled his body down from the bed.”  Ho! what a fate for the emissary of the Great King.  Wherefore, once more, the jubilant paradox, “The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman!” That is it:  the amazing, thrilling antithesis insisted on over and over again by the old Hebrew bard.  “Her sandals ravished his eyes, her beauty took his mind prisoner, and the fauchion passed through his neck.”  That is the leit-motif:  Sandro the poet knew it perfectly well and taught it to the no small comfort of Mr. Ruskin and his men.  Giuditta, dainty, blue-eyed, a girl still and three years a widow, flits homeward through a spring landscape of grey and green and the smile of a milky sky, being herself the dominant of the chord, with her bough of slipt olive and her jagged scimitar, with her pretty blue fal-lals smocked and puffed, and her yellow curls floating over her shoulders.  On her slim feet are the sandals that ravished his eyes; all her maiden bravery is dancing and fluttering like harebells in the wind.  Behind her plods the slave girl folded in an orange scarf, bearing that shapeless, nameless burden of hers, the head of the grim Lord Holofernes.  Oh, for that, it is the legend itself!  For look at the girl’s eyes.  What does their dreamy solemnity mean if not, “the Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman”?  One other delicate bit of symbolizing he has allowed himself, which I may not omit.  You are to see by whom this deed was done:  by a woman who has unsexed herself.  Judith is absorbed in her awful service; her robe trails on the ground and clings about her knees; she is unconscious of the hindrance.  The gates of Bethulia are in sight; the Chaldean horsemen are abroad, but she has no anxiety to escape.  She is swift because her life just now courses swiftly; but there is no haste.  The maid, you shall mark, picks up her skirts with careful hand, and steps out the more lustily for it.