itic finds
little to weaken his view of the Roman aesthetic inefficiency. "It was
not," he said, "the spontaneous utterance of an aesthetic instinct, but
the outcome of material needs and of patriotic pride," and hence only an
incomplete expression of Roman civilization. "To them, in brief, art
was not vernacular: their purest taste, their brightest gifts of mind,
found no utterance in it."

[Illustration: STUDY OF A HEAD]

"We have seen Art," he concluded, "such Art as it was given to Rome to
achieve--rise and fall with the virtues of the Roman people. From the
lips of the most seeing of its sons we know the solvent in which those
virtues perished: that solvent was the greed, the insatiate greed, of
gold--'auri sacra fames'--the rot of luxury. 'More deadly than arms,'
Juvenal magnificently exclaims, 'luxury has swept down upon us, and
avenges the conquered world.'

...... 'Saevior armis
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem.'"

From Rome we are taken, in the fifth Discourse, delivered on the 10th
December, 1887, to the making and the racial re-shaping of Italy, that
began with the fifth century. All through these Discourses the speaker
laid great stress upon the ethnological history of the European races,
as he turned to one after another, and essayed to trace their artistic
idiosyncracy and their artistic evolution. Italy is, to the ethnologist
as well as to the art student, one of the most interesting countries in
Europe. Rome almost alone, among the Italian provinces, retained her
racial and aesthetic peculiarities, unaffected to the end of the chapter;
and even when she wielded "the sceptre of the Christian world," still
she produced no one flower of native genius, we are reminded, unless
Giulio Romano, that "brawny and prolific plagiarist of Raphael," as
Leighton well stigmatizes him, be thought a genius; which criticism
forbid!

It was different with Tuscany, where the introduction of new racial
elements had a distinct effect. This "new amalgam" produced in the
field of Art, we are told, an infinitely nobler and more exquisite
result than had grown out of the old conditions. Still, however, the old
Etruscan allied grace and harsh strength lingered on in the art of
Christian Etruria. "Of the subtle graces which breathe in that art, from
Giotto to Lionardo, it is needless to speak; and surely in the rugged
angularities of a Verocchio, a Signorelli, or a Donatello, and