272 A PERSISTENT NATIONALITY. 



than of love ; a religion that strove harder to terrorize 

 than to attract ; a religion full of devils, flames, tortures, 

 and horrors ; in short, a sort of horrible Chinese religion 

 of dragons and monstrosities, and flames and goblins. 

 In the painted tombs of ancient Etruria you may see 

 the familiar devil with his three-pronged fork thrusting 

 souls back into the seething flood of a heathen hell, as 

 Orcagna's here thrust them back similarly into that of its 

 more modern Christian successor. All Etruscan art is 

 full throughout of such horrors. You find their traces 

 abundantly in the antique Etruscan museum at Florence ; 

 you find them on the mediaeval Campo Santo at Pisa ; 

 you find them with greater skill, but equal repulsiveness, 

 in the work of the great Eenaissance artists. The 

 ' ghastly glories of saints ' the Tuscan revels in. The 

 most famous portion of the most famous Tuscan poem is 

 the ' Inferno ' the part that gloats with minute and 

 truly Tuscan realism over the torments of the damned 

 in every department of the mediaeval hell. And, as if 

 still further to mark the continuity of thought, here in 

 Orcagna's frescoes at Santa Maria Novella you have 

 every horror of the heathen religion incongruously 

 mingled with every horror of the Christian gorgons and 

 harpies and chimaeras dire are tormenting the wicked 

 under the eyes of the Madonna ; centaurs are shooting 

 and prodding them before the God of Love from the 

 torrid banks of fiery lakes ; furies with snaky heads are 

 directing their punishments ; Minos and ^Eacus are 

 superintending their tasks ; and, in the centre of all, a 

 huge Moloch demon is devouring them bodily in his 

 fiery jaws, with hideous tusks as of a Japanese monster. 



