XI. THE PLACE OF DRAGONS 381

introduction seems to require a similar explanation. But we shall find that the battle with the dragon, though not reckoned among St. George’s deeds before the eleventh or twelfth century, is entirely appropriate to the earliest sources of his legend.

220. One other important parallel between Perseus and St. George deserves notice, though it does not bear directly upon these pictures. Both are distinguished by their burnished shields. The hero’s was given him by Athena, that, watching in it the reflected figure of the Gorgon,* he might strike rightly with his sickle-sword, nor need to meet in face the mortal horror of her look. The saint’s bright shield rallied once and again a breaking host of crusaders, as they seemed to see it blaze in their van under Antioch † wall, and by the breaches of desecrated Zion. But his was a magic mirror; work of craftsmen more cunning than might obey the Queen of Air. Turned to visions of terror and death, it threw back by law of diviner optics an altered image-the crimson blazon of its cross.‡ So much for the growth of the dragon legend, fragment of a most ancient faith, widely spread and variously localized, thus made human by Greek, and passionately spiritual by Christian, art.

221. We shall see later that Perseus is not St. George’s only blood-relation among the powers of earlier belief; but for Englishmen there may be a linked association, if more difficult to trace through historic descent, yet, in its perfect harmony, even more pleasantly strange. The great heroic poem which remains to us in the tongue of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors-intuitive creation and honourable treasure

* The allegorising Platonists interpret Medusa as a symbol of man’s sensual nature. This we shall find to be Carpaccio’s view of the dragon of St. George [p. 385].

† Acts xi. 26.

‡ Compare the strange reappearance of the Æginetan Athena as St. John on the Florin.¹ There the arm that bore the shield now with pointed finger gives emphasis and direction to the word “Behold.”

¹ [The florin of Florence, described in Val d’ Arno (Vol. XXIII. p. 72), on which the figure of St. John presents some likeness to the Athena from Aegina (at Munich).]

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