development, and may bear a lesson in them.

How I have rambled! But as that day was the turning-point of my whole short
life, I may be excused for lingering upon every feature of it.

Timidly, but eagerly, I went up to the picture, and stood entranced before
it. It was Guido's St. Sebastian. All the world knows the picture, and all
the world knows, too, the defects of the master, though in this instance he
seems to have risen above himself, by a sudden inspiration, into that true
naturalness, which is the highest expression of the Spiritual. But the
very defects of the picture, its exaggeration, its theatricality, were
especially calculated to catch the eye of a boy awaking out of the narrow
dulness of Puritanism. The breadth and vastness of light and shade upon
those manly limbs, so grand and yet so delicate, standing out against the
background of lurid night, the helplessness of the bound arms, the arrow
quivering in the shrinking side, the upturned brow, the eyes in whose dark
depths enthusiastic faith seemed conquering agony and shame, the parted
lips, which seemed to ask, like those martyrs in the Revelations,
reproachful, half-resigned, "O Lord, how long?"--Gazing at that picture
since, I have understood how the idolatry of painted saints could arise in
the minds even of the most educated, who were not disciplined by that stern
regard for fact which is--or ought to be--the strength of Englishmen. I
have understood the heart of that Italian girl, whom some such picture of
St. Sebastian, perhaps this very one, excited, as the Venus of Praxiteles
the Grecian boy, to hopeless love, madness, and death. Then I had never
heard of St. Sebastian. I did not dream of any connexion between that, or
indeed any picture, and Christianity; and yet, as I stood before it, I
seemed to be face to face with the ghosts of my old Puritan forefathers, to
see the spirit which supported them on pillories and scaffolds--the spirit
of that true St. Margaret, the Scottish maiden whom Claverhouse and his