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Updated: June 28, 2025
These solemn centuries look down upon this day; look down upon the sheathed sword, the broken coup stick, the shattered battle-axe, the deserted wigwams, the last red men mobilized on the plains of death. Ninety millions, with suffused eyes, watch this vanishing remnant of a race, whose regnant majesty inspires at the very moment it succumbs to the iconoclasm of civilization.
But if it be an answer to the dispatch from Flanders giving information of the outburst of iconoclasm and rebellion, or a subtly-conceived plan for the secret execution of Montigny or the assassination of Escovedo, or an order for the imprisonment or the death of the heir-apparent to the throne, you shall perceive nothing in that face, unruffled as a mask, by which to conjecture the sentiment or purpose of the mind.
We need not record similar scenes which took place almost everywhere. The last and grievous rule of iconoclasm set in with the restorers, who worked their will upon the fabric of our cathedrals and churches and did so much to obliterate all the fragments of good architectural work which the Cromwellian soldiers and the spoliators at the time of the Reformation had left.
One was an elaborate description of that huge iconoclasm attributed to Alcibiades, and considered by some philosophic students of history the chief cause of the ruin of Athens.
Hence arose the making of palimpsest brasses, the carvers using an old brass and on the reverse side cutting a memorial of a more recently deceased person. After all this iconoclasm, spoliation, and robbery it is surprising that anything of value should have been left in our churches. But happily some treasures escaped, and the gifts of two or three generations added others.
The attempt to enforce iconoclasm in Central Italy was influential in causing the loss of that province to the Empire; and even after the Byzantine rule had ceased there, the controversy about images tended to keep alive the antagonism, because, although that question was once and again settled in favor of the maintenance of images, yet many of the emperors, in whose persons the power of the East was embodied, were foremost in advocating their destruction.
The usual scenes of mad iconoclasm were enacted stained glass windows broken, altars thrown down, lead stripped from the roof, brasses and effigies defaced and broken. A creature named "Blue Dick" was the wild leader of this savage crew of spoliators who left little but the bare walls and a mass of broken fragments strewing the pavement.
The wealth of the world of modern ideas, which was not unknown to her though she had never cared to adventure in it alone, no longer frightened her now that she had a companion and guide. Insensibly she suffered herself, while she protested against it, to be drawn on to an understanding of the young Italians, whose ardent iconoclasm had always been distasteful to her.
Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth. It is, indeed, as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation; veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he that will be busie with vae vobis, let him looke shortly for coram nobis."
The next writer to bring forward a view of this character was the Rev. F.G. Fleay, the well-known Shakspere critic, whose ingenious efforts in iconoclasm cause a curious alternation of feeling between admiration and amazement. His argument is unfortunately mixed up with a question of textual criticism; for he rejects certain scenes in the play as the work of the inferior dramatist Middleton.
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