212 A Walk from 



haired heretics in love or religion have been stone - 

 masoned up alive in the walls of abbeys or convents. 

 Sir Walter Scott leaned to that belief, and perhaps 

 had credible history for it. But if the trowel has 

 slain its thousands, the whitewash swab has slain its 

 ten thousands of innocents. Think of the furlongs 

 of richly-wrought tapestry, full of sacred and profane 

 history, and the furlongs of curiously-carved panels, 

 wainscotting, and cornice that floppy, sloppy, vandal 

 brush of pigs' bristles and pail of diluted lime have 

 eclipsed and obliterated forever, and not a retributive 

 drop of the villainous mixture has fallen into the 

 perpetrator's eye to " make his foul intent seem 

 horrible ! " Think of Christian kings of glorious 

 memory, even Defenders of the Faith, with their fair 

 queens, princes of the blood, and knights, noble and 

 brave, all, in one still St. Bartholomew night of that 

 soft, thin, white flood, buried from the sight of the 

 living as completely as the Roman sentinel at his 

 post by the red gulf-stream of Vesuvius ! Still, we 

 must not be too hard on these seemingly barbarous 

 transactions. "Not in anger, not in wrath," nor in 

 foolish fancy, was that dripping brush always lifted 

 upon these works of art. Many a person of cultivated 

 taste saw a time when he could say, almost with 

 Sancho Panza, " blessings on the man who invented 



