ve like beings to
be affected by the ordinary concerns of life; but as if they could
only be moved by the vast of human events, the fall of empires, the
extinction of nations; as if the awful secrets of the future had
overwhelmed in them all present sympathies. As we have stood before
these lofty apparitions of the painter's mind, it has seemed to us
impossible that the most vulgar spectator could have remained there
irreverent.

With many critics it seems to have been doubted whether much that
we now admire in Raffaelle would ever have been but for his great
contemporary. Be this as it may, it is a fact of history, that, after
seeing the works of Michael Angelo, both his form and his style
assumed a breadth and grandeur which they possessed not before.
And yet these great artists had little, if any thing, in common;
a sufficient proof that an original mind may owe, and even freely
acknowledge, its impetus to another without any self-sacrifice.

As Michael Angelo adopted from others only what accorded with his
own peculiar genius, so did Raffaelle; and, wherever collected, the
materials of both could not but enter their respective minds as their
natural aliment.

The genius of Michael Angelo was essentially _Imaginative_. It
seems rarely to have been excited by the objects with which we are
daily familiar; and when he did treat them, it was rather as things
past, as they appear to us through the atmosphere of the hallowing
memory. We have a striking instance of this in his statue of Lorenzo
de' Medici; where, retaining of the original only enough to mark the
individual, and investing the rest with an air of grandeur that should
accord with his actions, he has left to his country, not a mere
effigy of the person, but an embodiment of the mind; a portrait
for posterity, in which the unborn might recognize Lorenzo the
Magnificent.

But the mind of Raffaelle was an ever-flowing fountain of human
sympathies; and in all that concerns man, in his vast varieties and
complicated relations, from the highest forms of majesty to the
humblest condition of humanity, even to the maimed and misshapen, he
may well be called a master. His Apostles, his philosophers, and most
ordinary subordinates, are all to us as living beings; nor do we feel
any doubt that they all had mothers, and brothers, and kindred. In
the assemblage of the Apostles (already referred to) at the Death of
Ananias, we look upon men whom the effusion of the Spir