sphemy to alter a feature of the angels who visited him that they
might live visibly for men in his colours in the cloister.

"Of all men the artist was nearest to heaven, therefore of all men was
he held most blessed.

"When Francis Valois stooped for the brush he only represented the
spirit of the age he lived in. It is what all wise kings do. It is their
only form of genius.

"Now-a-days what can men do in the Arts! Nothing.

"All has been painted--all sung--all said.

"All is twice told--in verse, in stone, in colour. There is no
untraversed ocean to tempt the Columbus of any Art.

"It is dreary--very dreary--that. All had been said and done so much
better than we can ever say or do it again. One envies those men who
gathered all the paradise flowers half opened, and could watch them
bloom.

"Art can only live by Faith: and what faith have we?

"Instead of Art we have indeed Science; but Science is very sad, for she
doubts all things and would prove all things, and doubt is endless, and
proof is a quagmire that looks like solid earth, and is but shifting
waters."

His voice was sad as it fell on the stillness of Arezzo--Arezzo who had
seen the dead gods come and go, and the old faiths rise and fall, there
where the mule trod its patient way and the cicala sang its summer song
above the place where the temple of the Bona Dea and the Church of
Christ had alike passed away, so that no man could tell their place.

It was all quiet around.

"I would rather have been Spinello than Petrarca," he pursued, after a
while. "Yes; though the sonnets will live as long as men love: and the
old man's work has almost every line of it crumbled away.

"But one can fancy nothing better than a life such as Spinello led for
nigh a century up on the hill here, painting, because he loved it, till
death took him. Of all lives, perhaps, that this world has ever seen,
the lives of painters, I say, in those days were the most perfect.

"Not only the magnificent pageants of Leonardo's, of Raffaelle's, of
Giorgone's: but the lowlier lives--the lives of men such as Santi, and
Ridolfi, and Benozzo, and Francia, and Timoteo, and many lesser men than
they, painters in fresco and grisaille, painters of miniatures, painters
of majolica and montelupo, painters who were never great, but who
attained infinite peacefulness and beauty in their native towns and
cities all over the face of Italy.

"In quiet places, such as Arezzo and Volterr