onquering the world with the demure
gravity and adorable primness of a high-born young abbess.

The actual fairy story becomes, little by little, more complete--the
painters of the fifteenth century work, little guessing it, are the
precursors of Walter Crane. The full-page illustration of a tale of
semi-mediaeval romance--of a romance like Spenser's "Fairy Queen" or
Mr. Morris's "Earthly Paradise," exists distinctly in that picture
and drawing, by the young Raphael or whomsoever else, of Apollo and
Marsyas.[9] This piping Marsyas seated by the tree stump, this naked
Apollo, thin and hectic like an undressed archangel, standing against
the Umbrian valley with its distant blue hills, its castellated village,
its delicate, thinly-leaved trees--things we know so well in connection
with the Madonna and Saints, that this seems absent for only a few
minutes--all this is as little like Ovid as the triumphant antique
Galatea of Raphael is like Spenser. Again, there is Piero di Cosimo's
Death of Procris: the poor young woman lying dead by the lake, with
the little fishing town in the distance, the swans sailing and cranes
strutting, and the dear young faun--no Praxitelian god with invisible
ears, still less the obscene beast whom the late Renaissance copied from
Antiquity--a most gentle, furry, rustic creature, stooping over her in
puzzled, pathetic concern, at a loss, with his want of the practice of
cities and the knowledge of womankind, what to do for this poor lady
lying among the reeds and the flowering scarlet sage; a creature the
last of whose kind (friendly, shy, woodland things, half bears or half
dogs, frequent in mediaeval legend), is the satyr of Fletcher's "Faithful
Shepherdess," the only poetic conception in that gross and insipid piece
of magnificent rhetoric. The perfection of the style must naturally be
sought from Botticelli, and in his Birth of Venus (but who may speak of
that after the writer of most subtle fancy, of most exquisite language,
among living Englishman?)[10] This goddess, not triumphant but sad in
her pale beauty, a king's daughter bound by some charm to flit on her
shell over the rippling sea, until the winds blow it in the kingdom of
the good fairy Spring, who shelters her in her laurel grove and covers
her nakedness with the wonderful mantle of fresh-blown flowers....

[Footnote 9: I believe now unanimously given to Pinturicchio.]

[Footnote 10: Alas! no longer among the living, though am