down on us delightedly, to tell us--Arnolfo
was _not_ the son of Lapo.

In these days you will have half a dozen doctors, writing each a long
book, and the sense of all will be,--Arnolfo wasn't the son of Lapo.
Much good may you get of that!

Well, you will find the fact to be, there was a great Northman builder, a
true son of Thor, who came down into Italy in 1200, served the order of
St. Francis there, built Assisi, taught Arnolfo how to build, with Thor's
hammer, and disappeared, leaving his name uncertain--Jacopo--Lapo--nobody
knows what. Arnolfo always recognizes this man as his true father, who put
the soul-life into him; he is known to his Florentines always as Lapo's
Arnolfo.

That, or some likeness of that, is the vital fact. You never can get at
the literal limitation of living facts. They disguise themselves by the
very strength of their life: get told again and again in different ways
by all manner of people;--the literalness of them is turned topsy-turvy,
inside-out, over and over again;--then the fools come and read them
wrong side upwards, or else, say there never was a fact at all. Nothing
delights a true blockhead so much as to prove a negative;--to show that
everybody has been wrong. Fancy the delicious sensation, to an
empty-headed creature, of fancying for a moment that he has emptied
everybody else's head as well as his own! nay, that, for once, his own
hollow bottle of a head has had the best of other bottles, and has been
_first_ empty;--first to know--nothing.

65. Hold, then, steadily the first tradition about this Arnolfo. That
his real father was called "Cambio" matters to you not a straw. That he
never called himself Cambio's Arnolfo--that nobody else ever called him
so, down to Vasari's time, is an infinitely significant fact to you. In
my twenty-second letter in Fors Clavigera you will find some account of
the noble habit of the Italian artists to call themselves by their
masters' names, considering their master as their true father. If not
the name of the master, they take that of their native place, as having
owed the character of their life to that. They rarely take their own
family name: sometimes it is not even known,--when best known, it is
unfamiliar to us. The great Pisan artists, for instance, never bear any
other name than 'the Pisan;' among the other five-and-twenty names in my
list, not above six, I think, the two German, with four Italian, are
family names. Perugino, (Peter