d be other than an enchanter calling with a persuasive or compelling
ritual, creatures, noble or ignoble, divine or daemonic, covered with
scales or in shining raiment, that he never imagined, out of the
bottomless deeps of imaginations he never foresaw; as if the noblest
achievement of art was not when the artist enfolds himself in darkness,
while he casts over his readers a light as of a wild and terrible dawn.

Let us therefore put away the designs to _The Divine Comedy_, in which
there is 'an ordinary intelligence,' and consider only the designs in
which the magical ritual has called up extraordinary shapes, the magical
light glimmered upon a world, different from the Dantesque world of our
own intelligence in its ordinary and daily moods, upon a difficult and
distinguished world. Most of the series of designs to Dante, and there are
a good number, need not busy any one for a moment. Genelli has done a
copious series, which is very able in the 'formal' 'generalized' way
which Blake hated, and which is spiritually ridiculous. Penelli has
transformed the 'Inferno' into a vulgar Walpurgis night, and a certain
Schuler, whom I do not find in the biographical dictionaries, but who was
apparently a German, has prefaced certain flaccid designs with some
excellent charts, while Stradanus has made a series for the 'Inferno,'
which has so many of the more material and unessential powers of art, and
is so extremely undistinguished in conception, that one supposes him to
have touched in the sixteenth century the same public Dore has touched in
the nineteenth.

Though with many doubts, I am tempted to value Flaxman's designs to the
'Inferno,' the 'Purgatorio,' and the 'Paradiso,' only a little above the
best of these, because he does not seem to have ever been really moved by
Dante, and so to have sunk into a formal manner, which is a reflection of
the vital manner of his Homer and Hesiod. His designs to _The Divine
Comedy_ will be laid, one imagines, with some ceremony in that immortal
wastepaper-basket in which Time carries with many sighs the failures of
great men. I am perhaps wrong, however, because Flaxman even at his best
has not yet touched me very deeply, and I hardly ever hope to escape this
limitation of my ruling stars. That Signorelli does not seem greatly more
interesting except here and there, as in the drawing of 'The Angel,' full
of innocence and energy, coming from the boat which has carried so many
souls to the