exactly like the tube of a larkspur or violet; both carrying game, and
talking to each other about--Greasy Joan and her pot, or the like. Not
at all the sort of persons whom you would have thought in harmony with
the scene;--by the laws of the drama, according to Racine or Voltaire.

No, but according to Shakespeare, or Giotto, these are just the kind of
persons likely to be there: as much as the angel is likely to be there
also, though you will be told nowadays that Giotto was absurd for
putting _him_ into the sky, of which an apothecary can always
produce the similar blue, in a bottle. And now that you have had
Shakespeare, and sundry other men of head and heart, following the
track of this shepherd lad, _you_ can forgive him his grotesques
in the corner. But that he should have forgiven them to himself, after
the training he had, this is the wonder! _We_ have seen simple
pictures enough in our day; and therefore we think that of course
shepherd boys will sketch shepherds: what wonder is there in that?

I can show you how in _this_ shepherd boy it was very wonderful
indeed, if you will walk for five minutes back into the church with me,
and up into the chapel at the end of the south transept,--at least if
the day is bright, and you get the Sacristan to undraw the window-curtain
in the transept itself. For then the light of it will be enough to show
you the entirely authentic and most renowned work of Giotto's master; and
you will see through what schooling the lad had gone.

A good and brave master he was, if ever boy had one; and, as you will
find when you know really who the great men are, the master is half
their life; and well they know it--always naming themselves from their
master, rather than their families. See then what kind of work Giotto
had been first put to. There is, literally, not a square inch of all