rt. As I draw my
materials into the limited form necessary for the hour, I find my
divided purpose doubly failing; and would fain rather use my time to-day
in supplying the defects of my last lecture, than in opening the greater
subject, which I must treat with still more lamentable inadequacy.
Nevertheless, you must not think it is for want of time that I omit
reference to other celebrated engravers, and insist on the special power
of these two only. Many not inconsiderable reputations are founded
merely on the curiosity of collectors of prints, or on partial skill in
the management of processes; others, though resting on more secure
bases, are still of no importance to you in the general history of art;
whereas you will find the work of Holbein and Botticelli determining for
you, without need of any farther range, the principal questions of
moment in the relation of the Northern and Southern schools of design.
Nay, a wider method of inquiry would only render your comparison less
accurate in result. It is only in Holbein's majestic range of capacity,
and only in the particular phase of Teutonic life which his art adorned,
that the problem can be dealt with on fair terms. We Northerns can
advance no fairly comparable antagonist to the artists of the South,
except at that one moment, and in that one man. Rubens cannot for an
instant be matched with Tintoret, nor Memling with Lippi; while
Reynolds only rivals Titian in what he learned from him. But in Holbein
and Botticelli we have two men trained independently, equal in power of
intellect, similar in material and mode of work, contemporary in age,
correspondent in disposition. The relation between them is strictly
typical of the constant aspects to each other of the Northern and
Southern schools.

142. Their point of closest contact is in the art of engraving, and this
art is developed entirely as the servant of the great passions which
perturbed or polluted Europe in the fifteenth century. The impulses
which it obeys are all new; and it obeys them with its own nascent
plasticity of temper. Painting and sculpture are only modified by them;
but engraving is educated.

These passions are in the main three; namely,

1. The thirst for classical literature, and the forms of proud and false
taste which arose out of it, in the position it had assumed as the enemy
of Christianity.

2. The pride of science, enforcing (in the particular domain of Art)
accuracy of perspective,