Nothing to look at! That is indeed--you will find, if you consider of
it--our sorrowful case. The vast extent of the advertising frescos of
London, daily refreshed into brighter and larger frescos by its
billstickers, cannot somehow sufficiently entertain the popular eyes.
The great Mrs. Allen, with her flowing hair, and equally flowing
promises, palls upon repetition, and that Madonna of the nineteenth
century smiles in vain above many a borgo unrejoiced; even the
excitement of the shop-window, with its unattainable splendours, or too
easily attainable impostures, cannot maintain itself in the wearying
mind of the populace, and I find my charitable friends inviting the
children, whom the streets educate only into vicious misery, to
entertainments of scientific vision, in microscope or magic lantern;
thus giving them something to look at, such as it is;--fleas mostly;
and the stomachs of various vermin; and people with their heads cut off
and set on again;--still _something_, to look at.

The fame of Cimabue rests, and justly, on a similar charity. He gave
the populace of his day something to look at; and satisfied their
curiosity with science of something they had long desired to know. We
have continually imagined in our carelessness, that his triumph
consisted only in a new pictorial skill; recent critical writers,
unable to comprehend how any street populace could take pleasure in
painting, have ended by denying his triumph altogether, and insisted
that he gave no joy to Florence; and that the "Joyful quarter" was
accidentally so named--or at least from no other festivity than that of
the procession attending Charles of Anjou. I proved to you, in a former
lecture, that the old tradition was true, and the delight of the people
unquestionable. But that delight was not merely in the revelation of an
art they had not known how to practise; it was delight in the
revelation of a Madonna whom they had not known how to love.