th such enthusiasm.

After the days of classic art we have endeavored to trace painting through
a period when it could scarcely be termed an art, so little of it was
done, and that little was so far below our ideal. Again, this decline was
followed by a Renaissance--an awakening--and from that day in the
fourteenth century when the Madonna of Cimabue was carried in triumph
through the streets of Florence, this art moved on with progressive steps
until Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, and others highly gifted,
had set up the standards which have remained as beacons and guides to all
the world.

In tracing this progress we have seen that Italy, the German nations,
Spain, France, and England have all striven to dream dreams of beauty and
grandeur, of tenderness and love, and to fix them in fitting colors where
all the world could see them.

The past is always fascinating. No stories are so pleasantly begun as
those that say, "A long time ago there lived," etc. One can have the most
complete satisfaction in the study of what has happened so far in the past
that we can see all its effects and judge of it by the tests which time is
sure to bring to everything. It is such a study that has been made in
these pages, and I would suggest that it has a second use scarcely less
important than the study of history--that is, the preparation it affords
for judging of what is done in the present. A knowledge of what has been
achieved enables us by comparison to decide upon the merits of new works.

The painting of to-day offers an immense field for investigation. When we
remember that five centuries ago the painters of the world could be
counted by tens, and are told that now there is an average of twenty-five
hundred painters in some foreign cities, we see that a lifetime is
scarcely sufficient in which to study the painting of our own era.

Have we not reason to hope that works are now being produced which shall
be studied and admired in the future as we study and admire those of the
past? Is it not true that the artistic works of any period show forth the
spirit of the time? If, then, the close of the Dark Ages and the dawn of a
better life could bring forth the treasures which remain from those days,
what ought to be the result of the more universal learning and the
advancing civilization of the nineteenth century? And so, in leaving this
book, I hope that it may be useful to all who read it for one purpose that
I have