IMPRESSIONS OF ITALY 175 



delighted me more than anything I have seen. . . ." (Life, ii, 

 p. 81). 



And in a letter from Naples to Sir John Evans (dated 

 December 10) : — 



*' In spite of snow on the ground we had three or four days 

 at Ravenna — which is the most interesting deadly lively sepulchre 

 of a place I was ever in in my life. The evolution of modern 

 from ancient art is all there in a nutshell. . . ." (Life, ii, 

 p. 85). 



Of Rome, to a daughter (January II, 1885) : — 



" Since the time of Constantine there has been nothing but 

 tawdry rubbish in the shape of architecture — the hopeless bad 

 taste of the Papists is a source of continual gratification to me as 

 a good Protestant (and something more). . . . But down to 

 the time of Constantine, Rome is endlessly interesting, and if I 

 were well I should like to spend some months in exploring it. 

 As it is, I do very little, though I have contrived to pick, up all 

 I want to know about Pagan Rome and the Catacombs, which 

 last are my especial weakness " (Life, ii, p. 88). 



And again, to his eldest son (January 20, 1885): — 



" I need hardly tell you that I find Rome wonderfully interest- 

 ing, and the attraction increases the longer one stays. 1 am 

 obliged to take care of myself and do but little in the way of 

 sight-seeing, but by directing one's attention to particular objects 

 one can learn a great deal without much trouble. I begin to 

 understand Old Rome pretty well, and I am quite learned in the 

 Catacombs, which suit me, as a kind of Christian fossils out of 

 which one can reconstruct the body of the primitive Church. 

 She was a simple maiden enough and vastly more attractive than 

 the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, so smothered 

 under the old clothes of Paganism which she has been appro- 

 priating for the last fifteen centuries that Jesus of Nazareth 

 would not know her if he met her " (Life, ii, p. 91). 



In the last quotation we find the beginning of a new 

 subject, critical theology, to which, along with philo- 



