St. Martin turns his back on the Empress, and hobnobs with him!
For which charity—mythic if you like, but evermore exemplary—he remains, as aforesaid, the patron of good-Christian topers to this hour.
As gathering years told upon him, he seems to have felt that he had carried weight of crozier long enough—that busy Tours must now find a busier Bishop—that, for himself, he might innocently henceforward take his pleasure and his rest where the vine grew and the lark sang. For his episcopal palace, he takes a little cave in the chalk cliffs of the up-country river: arranges all matters therein, for bed and board, at small cost. Night by night the stream murmurs to him, day by day the vine-leaves give their shade; and, daily by the horizon's breadth so much nearer Heaven, the fore-running sun goes down for him beyond the glowing water; —there, where now the peasant woman trots homewards between her panniers, and the saw rests in the half-cleft wood, and the village spire rises grey against the farthest light, in Turner's ' Loire-side.'[1]
All which things, though not themselves without profit, my special reason for telling you now, has been that you might understand the significance of
- ↑ Modern Painters, Plate 73.
