er ear, is _not_ one.

153. Why did not Sir Joshua--or could not--or would not Sir
Joshua--paint Madonnas? neither he, nor his great rival-friend
Gainsborough? Both of them painters of women, such as since Giorgione
and Correggio had not been; both painters of men, such as had not been
since Titian. How is it that these English friends can so brightly paint
that particular order of humanity which we call "gentlemen and ladies,"
but neither heroes, nor saints, nor angels? Can it be because they were
both country-bred boys, and for ever after strangely sensitive to
courtliness? Why, Giotto also was a country-bred boy. Allegri's native
Correggio, Titian's Cadore, were but hill villages; yet these men
painted, not the court, nor the drawing-room, but the Earth: and not a
little of Heaven besides: while our good Sir Joshua never trusts himself
outside the park palings. He could not even have drawn the strawberry
girl, unless she had got through a gap in them--or rather, I think, she
must have been let in at the porter's lodge, for her strawberries are in
a pottle, ready for the ladies at the Hall. Giorgione would have set
them, wild and fragrant, among their leaves, in her hand. Between his
fairness, and Sir Joshua's May-fairness, there is a strange, impassable
limit--as of the white reef that in Pacific isles encircles their inner
lakelets, and shuts them from the surf and sound of sea. Clear and calm
they rest, reflecting fringed shadows of the palm-trees, and the passing
of fretted clouds across their own sweet circle of blue sky. But beyond,
and round and round their coral bar, lies the blue of sea and heaven
together--blue of eternal deep.

154. You will find it a pregnant question, if you follow it forth, and
leading to many others, not trivial, Why it is, that in Sir Joshua's
girl, or Gainsborough's, we always think first of the Ladyhood; but in
Giotto's, of the Womanhood? Why, in Sir Joshua's hero, or Vandyck's, it
is always the Prince or the Sir whom we see first; but in Titian's, the
man.

Not that Titian's gentlemen are less finished than Sir Joshua's; but
their gentlemanliness[24] is not the principal thing about them; their
manhood absorbs, conquers, wears it as a despised thing. Nor--and this
is another stern ground of separation--will Titian make a gentleman of
everyone he paints. He will make him so if he is so, not otherwise; and
this not merely in general servitude to truth, but because in his
sympathy w