ite
cap and robe, and labelled on the picture itself, '_Joannes Bellinus_.'
Now this old man is a very ancient friend of mine, and has comforted my
heart, and preached me a sharp sermon, too, many a time. I never enter
that gallery without having five minutes' converse with him; and yet he
has been dead at least three hundred years, and, what is more, I don't
even know his name. But what more do I know of a man by knowing his
name? Whether the man's name be Brown, or whether he has as many names
and titles as a Spanish grandee, what does that tell me about the
_man_?--the spirit and character of the man--what the man will say when
he is asked--what the man will do when he is stirred up to action? The
man's name is part of his clothes; his shell; his husk. Change his name
and all his titles, you don't change _him_--'a man's a man for a' that,'
as Burns says; and a goose a goose. Other men gave him his name; but his
heart and his spirit--his love and his hatred--his wisdom and his
folly--his power to do well and ill; those God and himself gave him. I
must know those, and then I know the _man_. Let us see what we can make
out from the picture itself about the man whom it represents. In the
first place, we may see by his dress that he was in his day the Doge (or
chief magistrate) of Venice--the island city, the queen of the seas. So
we may guess that he had many a stirring time of it, and many a delicate
game to play among those tyrannous and covetous old merchant-princes who
had elected him; who were keeping up their own power at the expense of
everyone's liberty, by spies and nameless accusers, and secret councils,
tortures, and prisons, whose horrors no one ever returned to describe.
Nay, we may guess just the very men with whom he had to deal--the very
battles he may have seen fought.

"But all these are _circumstances_--things which _stand round_ the man
(as the word means), and not the whole man himself--not the character and
heart of the man: that we must get from the portrait; and if the portrait
is a truly noble portrait we shall get it. If it is a merely vulgar
picture, we shall get the man's dress and shape of his face, but little
or no expression: if it is a _pathetic_ portrait, or picture of passion,
we shall get one particular temporary expression of his face--perhaps
joy, sorrow, anger, disgust--but still one which may have passed any
moment, and left his face quite different; but if the picture is