gain and again, and ponder, by a sincere
expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be the cause what it may,
among all the many causes of sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity,
human or divine. But if you keep in mind when looking at it the facts
of Raphael's childhood, you will recognise in his father's picture, not
the anticipated sorrow of the "Mater Dolorosa" over the dead son, but
the grief of a simple household over the mother herself taken early
from it. That may have been the first picture the eyes of the world's
great painter of Madonnas rested on; and if he stood diligently before
it to copy, and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no disloyalty
to his original, refined, improved, substituted,--substituted himself,
in fact, his finer self--he had already struck the persistent note of
his career. As with his age, it is [41] his vocation, ardent worker as
he is, to enjoy himself--to enjoy himself amiably, and to find his
chief enjoyment in the attitude of a scholar. And one by one, one
after another, his masters, the very greatest of them, go to school to
him.

It was so especially with the artist of whom Raphael first became
certainly a learner--Perugino. Giovanni Santi had died in Raphael's
childhood, too early to have been in any direct sense his teacher. The
lad, however, from one and another, had learned much, when, with his
share of the patrimony in hand, enough to keep him, but not to tempt
him from scholarly ways, he came to Perugia, hoping still further to
improve himself. He was in his eighteenth year, and how he looked just
then you may see in a drawing of his own in the University Galleries,
of somewhat stronger mould than less genuine likenesses may lead you to
expect. There is something of a fighter in the way in which the nose
springs from the brow between the wide-set, meditative eyes. A
strenuous lad! capable of plodding, if you dare apply that word to
labour so impassioned as his--to any labour whatever done at Perugia,
centre of the dreamiest Apennine scenery. Its various elements (one
hardly knows whether one is thinking of Italian nature or of Raphael's
art in recounting them), the richly-planted lowlands, the sensitive
mountain lines in flight one beyond the other into clear distance, the
cool yet glowing atmosphere, [42] the romantic morsels of architecture,
which lend to the entire scene I know not what expression of reposeful
antiquity, arrange themselves here as fo