ness which we find not
infrequently, but strangely enough, in those faces which have been
associated with the happiest spirits and the brightest fortunes.

Raphael and his scholars painted and drew about nine hundred pictures
and sketches, including a hundred and twenty Madonnas, eight of which
are in private collections in England. Of Raphael's greatness, Kugler
writes that 'it is not so much in kind as in degree. No master left
behind _so many_ really excellent works as he, whose days were so early
numbered; in none has there been observed so little that is unpleasant.'
All authorities agree in ascribing much of Raphael's power to his purely
unselfish nature and aim. His excellence seems to lie in the nearly
perfect expression of material beauty and harmony, together with
grandeur of design and noble working out of thought. We shall see that
this devotion to material beauty has been made something of a reproach
to Raphael, as it certainly degenerated into a snare in the hands of his
followers, while unquestionably the universal appreciation of Raphael's
work, distinguished from the partial appreciation bestowed on the great
works of others, proceeds from this evident material beauty which is
open to all.

Then, again, Raphael, far more than Andrea del Sarto, deserved to be
called 'faultless;' and this general absence of defects and equality of
excellence is a great element of Raphael's wide popularity; for, as one
can observe for one's self, in regarding a work of art, there is always
a large proportion of the spectators who will seize on an error, dwell
on it, and be incapable of shaking off its influence, and rising into
the higher rank of critics, who discover and ponder over beauties. I
would have it considered also, that this equality of excellence does not
necessarily proceed always from a higher aim, but may arise rather from
an unconsciously lower aim.

The single reproach brought against Raphael as a painter is
that--according to some witnesses only, for most deny the
implication--Raphael so delighted in material beauty that he became
enslaved by it, till it diminished his spiritual insight. It is an
incontestable truth that in Raphael, as in all the great Italian
painters of his century, there was a falling away from the simple
earnestness, the exceeding reverence, the endless patience, the
self-abstraction, and self-devotion of the earliest Italian and Flemish
painters. Therefore there has been within th