for the sake of positive knowledge
than because he believed there was a spirit of order and beauty in
knowledge, which would come down and unite what men's ignorance had
divided, and renew what time had made dim. And so, while his actual work
has passed away, yet his own qualities are still active, and he himself
remains, as one alive in the grave, caesiis et vigilibus oculis, as his
biographer describes him, and with that sanguine, clear skin, decenti
rubore interspersa, as with the light of morning upon it; and he has a
true place in that group of great Italians who fill the end of the
fifteenth century with their names, he is a true HUMANIST. For the
essence of humanism is that belief of which he seems never to have
doubted, that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can
wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle
beside which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been
entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever
been passionate, or expended time and zeal.

1871.

SANDRO BOTTICELLI

In Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is mentioned by
Name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may be due to chance only,
but to some will rather appear a result of deliberate judgment; for
people have begun to find out the charm of Botticelli's work, and his
name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important.
In the middle of the fifteenth century he had already anticipated much
of that meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the
great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple religion
which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century, and the simple
naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of birds and flowers only,
he sought inspiration in what to him were works of the modern world, the
writings of Dante and Boccaccio, and in new readings of his own of
classical stories: or, if he painted religious incidents, painted them
with an under-current of original sentiment, which touches you as the
real matter of the picture through the veil of its ostensible subject.
What is the peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of
pleasure, which his work has the property of exciting in us, and which
we cannot get elsewhere? For this, especially when he has to speak of a
comparatively unknown artist, is always the chief question which a
critic has to answer.

In an age w