244 ST. MARK’S REST

of Sheba to see him sitting on.¹ Yes; and of the Egyptian throne of eternal granite, on which colossal Memnon sits, melodious to morning light,-son of Aurora.² Yes; and of the throne of Isis-Madonna, and, mightier yet than she, as we return towards the nativity of queens and kings. We must keep at present to our own poor little modern, practical saint-sitting on his portable throne (as at the side of the opera when extra people are let in who shouldn’t be); only seven hundred years old. To this cross-legged apparatus the Egyptian throne had dwindled down; it looks even as if the saint who sits on it might begin to think about getting up, some day or other.

46. All the more when you know who he is. Can you read the letters of his name, written beside him?-

SCS GEORGIVS

-Mr. Emerson’s purveyor of bacon, no less!* And he does look like getting up, when you observe him farther. Unsheathing his sword, is not he?

47. No; sheathing it. That was the difficult thing he had first to do, as you will find on reading the true legend of him, which this sculptor thoroughly knew; in whose conception of the saint, one perceives the date of said sculptor, no less than in the stiff work, so dimly yet perceptive of the ordinary laws of the aspect of things. From the bas-reliefs of the Parthenon-through sixteen hundred years of

* See Fors Clavigera of February 1873 (Vol. III.),³ containing the legend of St. George. This, with the other numbers of Fors referred to in the text of St. Mark’s Rest, may be bought at Venice, together with it.

¹ [The reference is not Biblical, but to Veronese’s conception of the scene, in his picture at Turin, copied and described by Ruskin. The Queen of Sheba, he says, is “nearly fainting before Solomon” (Vol. XVI. p. xxxvii.); for the picture see Plate III. in the same volume (p. 186).]

² [For the Colossus at Thebes, said to emit a musical sound at sunrise, see Strabo (xvii. 816), Pausanias (i. 42, 3), Juvenal (xv. 5), and many other classical writers. The Greeks poetically interpreted the sound as a salutation addressed by Memnon to this mother, the Dawn.]

³ [Fors, Letter 26. For Ruskin’s arrangement for the sale of Fors at Venice, see above, p. 163 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]