arts--the arts
of arrested movement--but its influence was to be seen also in the great
Graeco-Roman masques which were the constant amusement of the gay courts
of the time, and in the public pomps and processions with which the
citizens of big commercial towns were wont to greet the princes that
chanced to visit them; pageants, by the way, which were considered so
important that large prints were made of them and published--a fact which
is a proof of the general interest at the time in matters of such
kind.--_The Truth of Masks_.

THE ART OF ARCHAEOLOGY

Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some
form of art. I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious
scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is
of far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same
mythology as a disease of language. Better _Endymion_ than any theory,
however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic
among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of
Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his
'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology
beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most
vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of
actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth
century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio
also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress
of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the
amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary. At
the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two
thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century
was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's _Cosmography_.
Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of
Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well
illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the
hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their
knowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased
commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic
missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various
forms of contemporary dress. A