a little wiser, than Bewick's jackass?
Is it not also better, and wiser, than the sneer of modern science?
'What great men are we!--we, forsooth, can make almanacs, and know that
the earth turns round. Joshua indeed! Let us have no more talk of the
old-clothes-man.'

All Bewick's simplicity is in that; but none of Bewick's understanding.

203. I pass to the attack made by Botticelli upon the guilt of wealth.
So I had at first written; but I should rather have written, the appeal
made by him against the cruelty of wealth, then first attaining the
power it has maintained to this day.

The practice of receiving interest had been confined, until this
fifteenth century, with contempt and malediction, to the profession, so
styled, of usurers, or to the Jews. The merchants of Augsburg introduced
it as a convenient and pleasant practice among Christians also; and
insisted that it was decorous and proper even among respectable
merchants. In the view of the Christian Church of their day, they might
more reasonably have set themselves to defend adultery.[AX] However,
they appointed Dr. John Eck, of Ingoldstadt, to hold debates in all
possible universities, at their expense, on the allowing of interest;
and as these Augsburgers had in Venice their special mart, Fondaco,
called of the Germans, their new notions came into direct collision with
old Venetian ones, and were much hindered by them, and all the more,
because, in opposition to Dr. John Eck, there was preaching on the other
side of the Alps. The Franciscans, poor themselves, preached mercy to
the poor: one of them, Brother Marco of San Gallo, planned the 'Mount of
Pity' for their defense, and the merchants of Venice set up the first in
the world, against the German Fondaco. The dispute burned far on towards
our own times. You perhaps have heard before of one Antonio, a merchant
of Venice, who persistently retained the then obsolete practice of
lending money gratis, and of the peril it brought him into with the
usurers. But you perhaps did not before know why it was the flesh, or
heart of flesh, in him, that they so hated.

204. Against this newly risen demon of authorized usury, Holbein and
Botticelli went out to war together. Holbein, as we have partly seen in
his designs for the Dance of Death, struck with all his soldier's
strength.[AY] Botticelli uses neither satire nor reproach. He turns
altogether away from the criminals; appeals only to heaven for defense
against