niature town on a tray. The Virgin seems to be receiving
the message through the window or the open door. She has a beautiful bed
with a red silk coverlet, some books, and a shelf covered with plates
and preserve jars. This evident appreciation of jam, as one of the
pleasant things of this world, corresponds with the pot of flowers on
the window, the bird-cage hanging up: the mother of Christ must have the
little tastes and luxuries of a well-to-do burgess's daughter. Again,
the cell of St. Jerome, painted some thirty years later by Carpaccio, in
the Church of the Slavonians, contains not only various convenient and
ornamental articles of furniture, but a collection of nick-nacks, among
which some antique bronzes are conspicuous.

The charm in all this is not so much that of the actual objects
themselves; it is that of their having delighted those people's minds.
We are pleased by their pleasure, and our imagination is touched by
their fancy. The effect is akin to that of certain kinds of poetry,
not the dramatic certainly, where we are pleased by the mere suggestion
of beautiful things, and quite as much by finding in the poet a mind
appreciative and desirous of them, constantly collecting them and
enhancing them by subtle arrangements; it is the case with much lyric
verse, with the Italian folk-rhymes, woven out of names of flowers
and herbs, with some of Shakespeare's and Fletcher's songs, with the
"Allegro" and "Penseroso," Keats, some of Heine, and, despite a mixture
of unholy intention, Baudelaire. The great master thereof in the early
Renaissance, the lyrist, if I may use the word, of the fifteenth century,
is of course Botticelli. He is one of those who most persistently
introduce delightful items into their works: elaborately embroidered
veils, scarves, and gold fringes. But being a man of fine imagination
and most delicate sense of form, he does not, like Angelico or Benozzo
or Carpaccio, merely stick pretty things about; he works them all into
his strange arabesque, half intellectual, half physical. Thus the screen
of roses[7] behind certain of his Madonnas, forming an exquisite Morris
pattern with the greenish-blue sky interlaced; and those beautiful,
carefully-drawn branches of spruce-fir and cypress, lace-like in his
Primavera; above all, that fan-like growth of myrtles, delicately cut
out against the evening sky, which not merely print themselves as shapes
upon the mind, but seem to fill it with a scent of