foot of the mountain of purgation, can only be because one
knows him through poor reproductions from frescoes half mouldered away
with damp. A little-known series, drawn by Adolph Stuerler, an artist of
German extraction, who was settled in Florence in the first half of this
century, are very poor in drawing, very pathetic and powerful in
invention, and full of most interesting pre-Raphaelitic detail. There are
admirable and moving figures, who, having set love above reason, listen in
the last abandonment of despair to the judgment of Minos, or walk with a
poignant melancholy to the foot of his throne through a land where owls
and strange beasts move hither and thither with the sterile content of the
evil that neither loves nor hates, and a Cerberus full of patient cruelty.
All Stuerler's designs have, however, the languor of a mind that does its
work by a succession of delicate critical perceptions rather than the
decision and energy of true creation, and are more a curious contribution
to artistic methods than an imaginative force.

The only designs that compete with Blake's are those of Botticelli and
Giulio Clovio, and these contrast rather than compete; for Blake did not
live to carry his 'Paradiso' beyond the first faint pencillings, the first
thin washes of colour, while Botticelli only, as I think, became
supremely imaginative in his 'Paradiso,' and Clovio never attempted the
'Inferno' and 'Purgatorio' at all. The imaginations of Botticelli and
Clovio were overshadowed by the cloister, and it was only when they passed
beyond the world or into some noble peace, which is not the world's peace,
that they won a perfect freedom. Blake had not such mastery over figure
and drapery as had Botticelli, but he could sympathize with the persons
and delight in the scenery of the 'Inferno' and the 'Purgatorio' as
Botticelli could not, and could fill them with a mysterious and spiritual
significance born perhaps of mystical pantheism. The flames of Botticelli
give one no emotion, and his car of Beatrice is no symbolic chariot of the
Church led by the gryphon, half eagle, half lion, of Christ's dual nature,
but is a fragment of some mediaeval pageant pictured with a merely
technical inspiration. Clovio, the illuminator of missals, has tried to
create with that too easy hand of his a Paradise of serene air reflected
in a little mirror, a heaven of sociability and humility and prettiness, a
heaven of women and of monks; but one ca