DESIGN IN THE FLORENTINE SCHOOLS OF ENGRAVING.

181.  In the first of these lectures, I stated to you their subject, as the investigation of the engraved work of a group of men, to whom engraving, as a means of popular address, was above all precious, because their art was distinctively didactic.

Some of my hearers must be aware that, of late years, the assertion that art should be didactic has been clamorously and violently derided by the countless crowd of artists who have nothing to represent, and of writers who have nothing to say; and that the contrary assertion ­that art consists only in pretty colors and fine words, ­is accepted, readily enough, by a public which rarely pauses to look at a picture with attention, or read a sentence with understanding.

182.  Gentlemen, believe me, there never was any great advancing art yet, nor can be, without didactic purpose.  The leaders of the strong schools are, and must be always, either teachers of theology, or preachers of the moral law.  I need not tell you that it was as teachers of theology on the walls of the Vatican that the masters with whose names you are most familiar obtained their perpetual fame.  But however great their fame, you have not practically, I imagine, ever been materially assisted in your preparation for the schools either of philosophy or divinity by Raphael’s ‘School of Athens,’ by Raphael’s ’Theology,’ ­or by Michael Angelo’s ‘Judgment.’  My task, to-day, is to set before you some part of the design of the first Master of the works in the Sistine Chapel; and I believe that, from his teaching, you will, even in the hour which I ask you now to give, learn what may be of true use to you in all your future labor, whether in Oxford or elsewhere.

183.  You have doubtless, in the course of these lectures, been occasionally surprised by my speaking of Holbein and Sandro Botticelli, as Reformers, in the same tone of respect, and with the same implied assertion of their intellectual power and agency, with which it is usual to speak of Luther and Savonarola.  You have been accustomed, indeed, to hear painting and sculpture spoken of as supporting or enforcing Church doctrine; but never as reforming or chastising it.  Whether Protestant or Roman Catholic, you have admitted what in the one case you held to be the abuse of painting in the furtherance of idolatry, ­in the other, its amiable and exalting ministry to the feebleness of faith.  But neither has recognized, ­the Protestant his ally, ­or the Catholic his enemy, in the far more earnest work of the great painters of the fifteenth century.  The Protestant was, in most cases, too vulgar to understand the aid offered to him by painting; and in all cases too terrified to believe in it.  He drove the gift-bringing Greek with imprecations from his sectarian fortress, or received him within it only on the condition that he should speak no word of religion there.

184.  On the other hand, the Catholic, in most cases too indolent to read, and, in all, too proud to dread, the rebuke of the reforming painters, confused them with the crowd of his old flatterers, and little noticed their altered language or their graver brow.  In a little while, finding they had ceased to be amusing, he effaced their works, not as dangerous, but as dull; and recognized only thenceforward, as art, the innocuous bombast of Michael Angelo, and fluent efflorescence of Bernini.  But when you become more intimately and impartially acquainted with the history of the Reformation, you will find that, as surely and earnestly as Memling and Giotto strove in the north and south to set forth and exalt the Catholic faith, so surely and earnestly did Holbein and Botticelli strive, in the north, to chastise, and, in the south, to revive it.  In what manner, I will try to-day briefly to show you.

185.  I name these two men as the reforming leaders:  there were many, rank and file, who worked in alliance with Holbein; with Botticelli, two great ones, Lippi and Perugino.  But both of these had so much pleasure in their own pictorial faculty, that they strove to keep quiet, and out of harm’s way, ­involuntarily manifesting themselves sometimes, however; and not in the wisest manner.  Lippi’s running away with a novice was not likely to be understood as a step in Church reformation correspondent to Luther’s marriage.[AS] Nor have Protestant divines, even to this day, recognized the real meaning of the reports of Perugino’s ‘infidelity.’  Botticelli, the pupil of the one, and the companion of the other, held the truths they taught him through sorrow as well as joy; and he is the greatest of the reformers, because he preached without blame; though the least known, because he died without victory.

I had hoped to be able to lay before you some better biography of him than the traditions of Vasari, of which I gave a short abstract some time back in Fors Clavigera (Letter XXII.); but as yet I have only added internal evidence to the popular story, the more important points of which I must review briefly.  It will not waste your time if I read, ­instead of merely giving you reference to, ­the passages on which I must comment.

186.  “His father, Mariano Filipepi, a Florentine citizen, brought him up with care, and caused him to be instructed in all such things as are usually taught to children before they choose a calling.  But although the boy readily acquired whatever he wished to learn, yet was he constantly discontented; neither would he take any pleasure in reading, writing, or accounts, insomuch that the father, disturbed by the eccentric habits of his son, turned him over in despair to a gossip of his, called Botticello, who was a goldsmith, and considered a very competent master of his art, to the intent that the boy might learn the same.”

“He took no pleasure in reading, writing, nor accounts”!  You will find the same thing recorded of Cimabue; but it is more curious when stated of a man whom I cite to you as typically a gentleman and a scholar.  But remember, in those days, though there were not so many entirely correct books issued by the Religious Tract Society for boys to read, there were a great many more pretty things in the world for boys to see.  The Val d’Arno was Pater-noster Row to purpose; their Father’s Row, with books of His writing on the mountain shelves.  And the lad takes to looking at things, and thinking about them, instead of reading about them, ­which I commend to you also, as much the more scholarly practice of the two.  To the end, though he knows all about the celestial hierarchies, he is not strong in his letters, nor in his dialect.  I asked Mr. Tyrwhitt to help me through with a bit of his Italian the other day.  Mr. Tyrwhitt could only help me by suggesting that it was “Botticelli for so-and-so.”  And one of the minor reasons which induced me so boldly to attribute these sibyls to him, instead of Bandini, is that the lettering is so ill done.  The engraver would assuredly have had his lettering all right, ­or at least neat.  Botticelli blunders through it, scratches impatiently out when he goes wrong:  and as I told you there’s no repentance in the engraver’s trade, leaves all the blunders visible.

187.  I may add one fact bearing on this question lately communicated to me.[AT] In the autumn of 1872 I possessed myself of an Italian book of pen drawings, some, I have no doubt, by Mantegna in his youth, others by Sandro himself.  In examining these, I was continually struck by the comparatively feeble and blundering way in which the titles were written, while all the rest of the handling was really superb; and still more surprised when, on the sleeves and hem of the robe of one of the principal figures of women, ("Helena rápita da Paris,”) I found what seemed to be meant for inscriptions, intricately embroidered; which nevertheless, though beautifully drawn, I could not read.  In copying Botticelli’s Zipporah this spring, I found the border of her robe wrought with characters of the same kind, which a young painter, working with me, who already knows the minor secrets of Italian art better than I,[AU] assures me are letters, ­and letters of a language hitherto undeciphered.

188.  “There was at that time a close connection and almost constant intercourse between the goldsmiths and the painters, wherefore Sandro, who possessed considerable ingenuity, and was strongly disposed to the arts of design, became enamored of painting, and resolved to devote himself entirely to that vocation.  He acknowledged his purpose at once to his father; and the latter, who knew the force of his inclination, took him accordingly to the Carmelite monk, Fra Filippo, who was a most excellent painter of that time, with whom he placed him to study the art, as Sandro himself had desired.  Devoting himself thereupon entirely to the vocation he had chosen, Sandro so closely followed the directions, and imitated the manner, of his master, that Fra Filippo conceived a great love for him, and instructed him so effectually, that Sandro rapidly attained to such a degree in art as none would have predicted for him.”

I have before pointed out to you the importance of training by the goldsmith.  Sandro got more good of it, however, than any of the other painters so educated, ­being enabled by it to use gold for light to color, in a glowing harmony never reached with equal perfection, and rarely attempted, in the later schools.  To the last, his paintings are partly treated as work in niello; and he names himself, in perpetual gratitude, from this first artisan master.  Nevertheless, the fortunate fellow finds, at the right moment, another, even more to his mind, and is obedient to him through his youth, as to the other through his childhood.  And this master loves him; and instructs him ’so effectually,’ ­in grinding colors, do you suppose, only; or in laying of lines only; or in anything more than these?

189.  I will tell you what Lippi must have taught any boy whom he loved.  First, humility, and to live in joy and peace, injuring no man ­if such innocence might be.  Nothing is so manifest in every face by him, as its gentleness and rest.  Secondly, to finish his work perfectly, and in such temper that the angels might say of it ­not he himself ­’Iste perfecit opus.’  Do you remember what I told you in the Eagle’s Nest (Se, that true humility was in hoping that angels might sometimes admire our work; not in hoping that we should ever be able to admire theirs?  Thirdly, ­a little thing it seems, but was a great one, ­love of flowers.  No one draws such lilies or such daisies as Lippi.  Botticelli beat him afterwards in roses, but never in lilies.  Fourthly, due honor for classical tradition.  Lippi is the only religious painter who dresses John Baptist in the camelskin, as the Greeks dressed Heracles in the lion’s ­over the head.  Lastly, and chiefly of all, ­Le Pere Hyacinthe taught his pupil certain views about the doctrine of the Church, which the boy thought of more deeply than his tutor, and that by a great deal; and Master Sandro presently got himself into such question for painting heresy, that if he had been as hot-headed as he was true-hearted, he would soon have come to bad end by the tar-barrel.  But he is so sweet and so modest, that nobody is frightened; so clever, that everybody is pleased:  and at last, actually the Pope sends for him to paint his own private chapel, ­where the first thing my young gentleman does, mind you, is to paint the devil in a monk’s dress, tempting Christ!  The sauciest thing, out and out, done in the history of the Reformation, it seems to me; yet so wisely done, and with such true respect otherwise shown for what was sacred in the Church, that the Pope didn’t mind:  and all went on as merrily as marriage bells.

190.  I have anticipated, however, in telling you this, the proper course of his biography, to which I now return.

“While still a youth he painted the figure of Fortitude, among those pictures of the Virtues which Antonio and Pietro Pollaiuolo were executing in the Mercatanzia, or Tribunal of Commerce, in Florence.  In Santo Spirito, a church of the same city, he painted a picture for the chapel of the Bardi family:  this work he executed with great diligence, and finished it very successfully, depicting certain olive and palm trees therein with extraordinary care.”

It is by a beautiful chance that the first work of his, specified by his Italian biographer, should be the Fortitude.[AV] Note also what is said of his tree drawing.

“Having, in consequence of this work, obtained much credit and reputation, Sandro was appointed by the Guild of Porta Santa Maria to paint a picture in San Marco, the subject of which is the Coronation of Our Lady, who is surrounded by a choir of angels ­the whole extremely well designed, and finished by the artist with infinite care.  He executed various works in the Medici Palace for the elder Lorenzo, more particularly a figure of Pallas on a shield wreathed with vine branches, whence flames are proceeding:  this he painted of the size of life.  A San Sebastiano was also among the most remarkable of the works executed for Lorenzo.  In the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Florence, is a Pieta, with small figures, by this master:  this is a very beautiful work.  For different houses in various parts of the city Sandro painted many pictures of a round form, with numerous figures of women undraped.  Of these there are still two examples at Castello, a villa of the Duke Cosimo, ­one representing the birth of Venus, who is borne to earth by the Loves and Zéphyrs; the second also presenting the figure of Venus crowned with flowers by the Graces:  she is here intended to denote the Spring, and the allegory is expressed by the painter with extraordinary grace.”

Our young Reformer enters, it seems, on a very miscellaneous course of study; the Coronation of Our Lady; St. Sebastian; Pallas in vine-leaves; and Venus, ­without fig-leaves.  Not wholly Calvinistic, Fra Filippo’s teaching seems to have been!  All the better for the boy ­being such a boy as he was:  but I cannot in this lecture enter farther into my reasons for saying so.

191.  Vasari, however, has shot far ahead in telling us of this picture of the Spring, which is one of Botticelli’s completest works.  Long before he was able to paint Greek nymphs, he had done his best in idealism of greater spirits; and, while yet quite a youth, painted, at Castello, the Assumption of Our Lady, with “the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles, the evangelists, the martyrs, the confessors, the doctors, the virgins, and the hierarchies!”

Imagine this subject proposed to a young, (or even old) British Artist, for his next appeal to public sensation at the Academy!  But do you suppose that the young British artist is wiser and more civilized than Lippi’s scholar, because his only idea of a patriarch is of a man with a long beard; of a doctor, the M.D. with the brass plate over the way; and of a virgin, Miss ­ of the ­ theater?

Not that even Sandro was able, according to Vasari’s report, to conduct the entire design himself.  The proposer of the subject assisted him; and they made some modifications in the theology, which brought them both into trouble ­so early did Sandro’s innovating work begin, into which subjects our gossiping friend waives unnecessary inquiry, as follows.

“But although this picture is exceedingly beautiful, and ought to have put envy to shame, yet there were found certain malevolent and censorious persons who, not being able to affix any other blame to the work, declared that Matteo and Sandro had erred gravely in that matter, and had fallen into grievous heresy.

“Now, whether this be true or not, let none expect the judgment of that question from me:  it shall suffice me to note that the figures executed by Sandro in that work are entirely worthy of praise; and that the pains he took in depicting those circles of the heavens must have been very great, to say nothing of the angels mingled with the other figures, or of the various foreshortenings, all which are designed in a very good manner.

“About this time Sandro received a commission to paint a small picture with figures three parts of a braccio high, ­the subject an Adoration of the Magi.

“It is indeed a most admirable work; the composition, the design, and the coloring are so beautiful that every artist who examines it is astonished; and, at the time, it obtained so great a name in Florence, and other places, for the master, that Pope Sixtus IV. having erected the chapel built by him in his palace at Rome, and desiring to have it adorned with paintings, commanded that Sandro Botticelli should be appointed Superintendent of the work.”

192.  Vasari’s words, “about this time,” are evidently wrong.  It must have been many and many a day after he painted Matteo’s picture that he took such high standing in Florence as to receive the mastership of the works in the Pope’s chapel at Rome.  Of his position and doings there, I will tell you presently; meantime, let us complete the story of his life.

“By these works Botticelli obtained great honor and reputation among the many competitors who were laboring with him, whether Florentines or natives of other cities, and received from the Pope a considerable sum of money; but this he consumed and squandered totally, during his residence in Rome, where he lived without due care, as was his habit.”

193.  Well, but one would have liked to hear how he squandered his money, and whether he was without care ­of other things than money.

It is just possible, Master Vasari, that Botticelli may have laid out his money at higher interest than you know of; meantime, he is advancing in life and thought, and becoming less and less comprehensible to his biographer.  And at length, having got rid, somehow, of the money he received from the Pope; and finished the work he had to do, and uncovered it, ­free in conscience, and empty in purse, he returned to Florence, where, “being a sophistical person, he made a comment on a part of Dante, and drew the Inferno, and put it in engraving, in which he consumed much time; and not working for this reason, brought infinite disorder into his affairs.”

194.  Unpaid work, this engraving of Dante, you perceive, ­consuming much time also, and not appearing to Vasari to be work at all.  It is but a short sentence, gentlemen, ­this, in the old edition of Vasari, and obscurely worded, ­a very foolish person’s contemptuous report of a thing to him totally incomprehensible.  But the thing itself is out-and-out the most important fact in the history of the religious art of Italy.  I can show you its significance in not many more words than have served to record it.

Botticelli had been painting in Rome; and had expressly chosen to represent there, ­being Master of Works, in the presence of the Defender of the Faith, ­the foundation of the Mosaic law; to his mind the Eternal Law of God, ­that law of which modern Evangelicals sing perpetually their own original psalm, “Oh, how hate I Thy law! it is my abomination all the day.”  Returning to Florence, he reads Dante’s vision of the Hell created by its violation.  He knows that the pictures he has painted in Rome cannot be understood by the people; they are exclusively for the best trained scholars in the Church.  Dante, on the other hand, can only be read in manuscript; but the people could and would understand his lessons, if they were pictured in accessible and enduring form.  He throws all his own lauded work aside, ­all for which he is most honored, and in which his now matured and magnificent skill is as easy to him as singing to a perfect musician.  And he sets himself to a servile and despised labor, ­his friends mocking him, his resources failing him, infinite ‘disorder’ getting into his affairs ­of this world.

195.  Never such another thing happened in Italy any more.  Botticelli engraved her Pilgrim’s Progress for her, putting himself in prison to do it.  She would not read it when done.  Raphael and Marc Antonio were the theologians for her money.  Pretty Madonnas, and satyrs with abundance of tail, ­let our pilgrim’s progress be in these directions, if you please.

Botticelli’s own pilgrimage, however, was now to be accomplished triumphantly, with such crowning blessings as Heaven might grant to him.  In spite of his friends and his disordered affairs, he went his own obstinate way; and found another man’s words worth engraving as well as Dante’s; not without perpetuating, also, what he deemed worthy of his own.

196.  What would that be, think you?  His chosen works before the Pope in Rome? ­his admired Madonnas in Florence? ­his choirs of angels and thickets of flowers?  Some few of these yes, as you shall presently see; but “the best attempt of this kind from his hand is the Triumph of Faith, by Fra Girolamo Savonarola, of Ferrara, of whose sect our artist was so zealous a partisan that he totally abandoned painting, and not having any other means of living, he fell into very great difficulties.  But his attachment to the party he had adopted increased; he became what was then called a Piagnone, or Mourner, and abandoned all labor; insomuch that, finding himself at length become old, being also very poor, he must have died of hunger had he not been supported by Lorenzo de’ Medici, for whom he had worked at the small hospital of Volterra and other places, who assisted him while he lived, as did other friends and admirers of his talents.”

197.  In such dignity and independence ­having employed his talents not wholly at the orders of the dealer ­died, a poor bedesman of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the President of that high academy of art in Rome, whose Academicians were Perugino, Ghirlandajo, Angelico, and Signorelli; and whose students, Michael Angelo and Raphael.

‘A worthless, ill-conducted fellow on the whole,’ thinks Vasari, ’with a crazy fancy for scratching on copper.’

Well, here are some of the scratches for you to see; only, first, I must ask you seriously for a few moments to consider what the two powers were, which, with this iron pen of his, he has set himself to reprove.

198.  Two great forms of authority reigned over the entire civilized world, confessedly, and by name, in the Middle Ages.  They reign over it still, and must forever, though at present very far from confessed; and, in most places, ragingly denied.

The first power is that of the Teacher, or true Father; the Father ’in God.’  It may be ­happy the children to whom it is ­the actual father also; and whose parents have been their tutors.  But, for the most part, it will be some one else who teaches them, and molds their minds and brain.  All such teaching, when true, being from above, and coming down from the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning, is properly that of the holy Catholic ‘[Greek:  ekklesia],’ council, church, or papacy, of many fathers in God, not of one.  Eternally powerful and divine; reverenced of all humble and lowly scholars, in Jewry, in Greece, in Rome, in Gaul, in England, and beyond sea, from Arctic zone to zone.

The second authority is the power of National Law, enforcing justice in conduct by due reward and punishment.  Power vested necessarily in magistrates capable of administering it with mercy and equity; whose authority, be it of many or few, is again divine, as proceeding from the King of kings, and was acknowledged, throughout civilized Christendom, as the power of the Holy Empire, or Holy Roman Empire, because first throned in Rome; but it is forever also acknowledged, namelessly, or by name, by all loyal, obedient, just, and humble hearts, which truly desire that, whether for them or against them, the eternal equities and dooms of Heaven should be pronounced and executed; and as the wisdom or word of their Father should be taught, so the will of their Father should be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.

199.  You all here know what contention, first, and then what corruption and dishonor, had paralyzed these two powers before the days of which we now speak.  Reproof, and either reform or rebellion, became necessary everywhere.  The northern Reformers, Holbein, and Luther, and Henry, and Cromwell, set themselves to their task rudely, and, it might seem, carried it through.  The southern Reformers, Dante, and Savonarola, and Botticelli, set hand to their task reverently, and, it seemed, did not by any means carry it through.  But the end is not yet.

200.  Now I shall endeavor to-day to set before you the art of Botticelli, especially as exhibiting the modesty of great imagination trained in reverence, which characterized the southern Reformers; and as opposed to the immodesty of narrow imagination, trained in self-trust, which characterized the northern Reformers.

‘The modesty of great imagination;’ that is to say, of the power which conceives all things in true relation, and not only as they affect ourselves.  I can show you this most definitely by taking one example of the modern, and unschooled temper, in Bewick;[AW] and setting it beside Botticelli’s treatment of the same subject of thought, ­namely, the meaning of war, and the reforms necessary in the carrying on of war.

201.  Both the men are entirely at one in their purpose.  They yearn for peace and justice to rule over the earth, instead of the sword; but see how differently they will say what is in their hearts to the people they address.  To Bewick, war was more an absurdity than it was a horror:  he had not seen battle-fields, still less had he read of them, in ancient days.  He cared nothing about heroes, ­Greek, Roman, or Norman.  What he knew, and saw clearly, was that Farmer Hodge’s boy went out of the village one holiday afternoon, a fine young fellow, rather drunk, with a colored ribbon in his hat; and came back, ten years afterwards, with one leg, one eye, an old red coat, and a tobacco-pipe in the pocket of it.  That is what he has got to say, mainly.  So, for the pathetic side of the business, he draws you two old soldiers meeting as bricklayers’ laborers; and for the absurd side of it, he draws a stone, sloping sideways with age, in a bare field, on which you can just read, out of a long inscription, the words “glorious victory;” but no one is there to read them, ­only a jackass, who uses the stone to scratch himself against.

202.  Now compare with this Botticelli’s reproof of war. He had seen it, and often; and between noble persons; ­knew the temper in which the noblest knights went out to it; ­knew the strength, the patience, the glory, and the grief of it.  He would fain see his Florence in peace; and yet he knows that the wisest of her citizens are her bravest soldiers.  So he seeks for the ideal of a soldier, and for the greatest glory of war, that in the presence of these he may speak reverently, what he must speak.  He does not go to Greece for his hero.  He is not sure that even her patriotic wars were always right.  But, by his religious faith, he cannot doubt the nobleness of the soldier who put the children of Israel in possession of their promised land, and to whom the sign of the consent of heaven was given by its pausing light in the valley of Ajalon.  Must then setting sun and risen moon stay, he thinks, only to look upon slaughter?  May no soldier of Christ bid them stay otherwise than so?  He draws Joshua, but quitting his hold of the sword:  its hilt rests on his bent knee; and he kneels before the sun, not commands it; and this is his prayer: ­

“Oh, King of kings, and Lord of lords, who alone rulest always in eternity, and who correctest all our wanderings, ­Giver of melody to the choir of the angels, listen Thou a little to our bitter grief, and come and rule us, oh Thou highest King, with Thy love which is so sweet!”

Is not that a little better, and 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 them.  He engraves the design which, of all his work, must have cost him hardest toil in its execution, ­the Virgin praying to her Son in heaven for pity upon the poor:  “For these are also my children."[AZ] Underneath, are the seven works of Mercy; and in the midst of them, the building of the Mount of Pity:  in the distance lies Italy, mapped in cape and bay, with the cities which had founded mounts of pity, ­Venice in the distance, chief.  Little seen, but engraved with the master’s loveliest care, in the background there is a group of two small figures ­the Franciscan brother kneeling, and an angel of Victory crowning him.

205.  I call it an angel of Victory, observe, with assurance; although there is no legend claiming victory, or distinguishing this angel from any other of those which adorn with crowns of flowers the nameless crowds of the blessed.  For Botticelli has other ways of speaking than by written legends.  I know by a glance at this angel that he has taken the action of it from a Greek coin; and I know also that he had not, in his own exuberant fancy, the least need to copy the action of any figure whatever.  So I understand, as well as if he spoke to me, that he expects me, if I am an educated gentleman, to recognize this particular action as a Greek angel’s; and to know that it is a temporal victory which it crowns.

206.  And now farther, observe, that this classical learning of Botticelli’s, received by him, as I told you, as a native element of his being, gives not only greater dignity and gentleness, but far wider range, to his thoughts of Reformation.  As he asks for pity from the cruel Jew to the poor Gentile, so he asks for pity from the proud Christian to the untaught Gentile.  Nay, for more than pity, for fellowship, and acknowledgment of equality before God.  The learned men of his age in general brought back the Greek mythology as anti-Christian.  But Botticelli and Perugino, as pre-Christian; nor only as pre-Christian, but as the foundation of Christianity.  But chiefly Botticelli, with perfect grasp of the Mosaic and classic theology, thought over and seized the harmonies of both; and he it was who gave the conception of that great choir of the prophets and sibyls, of which Michael Angelo, more or less ignorantly borrowing it in the Sistine Chapel, in great part lost the meaning, while he magnified the aspect.

207.  For, indeed, all Christian and heathen mythology had alike become to Michael Angelo only a vehicle for the display of his own powers of drawing limbs and trunks:  and having resolved, and made the world of his day believe, that all the glory of design lay in variety of difficult attitude, he flings the naked bodies about his ceiling with an upholsterer’s ingenuity of appliance to the corners they could fit, but with total absence of any legible meaning.  Nor do I suppose that one person in a million, even of those who have some acquaintance with the earlier masters, takes patience in the Sistine Chapel to conceive the original design.  But Botticelli’s mastership of the works evidently was given to him as a theologian, even more than as a painter; and the moment when he came to Rome to receive it, you may hold for the crisis of the Reformation in Italy.  The main effort to save her priesthood was about to be made by her wisest Reformer, ­face to face with the head of her Church, ­not in contest with him, but in the humblest subjection to him; and in adornment of his own chapel for his own delight, and more than delight, if it might be.

208.  Sandro brings to work, not under him, but with him, the three other strongest and worthiest men he knows, Perugino, Ghirlandajo, and Luca Signorelli.  There is evidently entire fellowship in thought between Botticelli and Perugino.  They two together plan the whole; and Botticelli, though the master, yields to Perugino the principal place, the end of the chapter, on which is to be the Assumption of the Virgin.  It was Perugino’s favorite subject, done with his central strength; assuredly the crowning work of his life, and of lovely Christian art in Europe.

Michael Angelo painted it out, and drew devils and dead bodies all over the wall instead.  But there remains to us, happily, the series of subjects designed by Botticelli to lead up to this lost one.

209.  He came, I said, not to attack, but to restore the Papal authority.  To show the power of inherited honor, and universal claim of divine law, in the Jewish and Christian Church, ­the law delivered first by Moses; then, in final grace and truth, by Christ.

He designed twelve great pictures, each containing some twenty figures the size of life, and groups of smaller ones scarcely to be counted.  Twelve pictures, ­six to illustrate the giving of the law by Moses; and six, the ratification and completion of it by Christ.  Event by event, the jurisprudence of each dispensation is traced from dawn to close in this correspondence.

       1.  Covenant of Circumcision.
       2.  Entrance on his Ministry by Moses.
       3.  Moses by the Red Sea.
       4.  Delivery of Law on Sinai.
       5.  Destruction of Korah.
       6.  Death of Moses.
       7.  Covenant of Baptism.
       8.  Entrance on His Ministry by Christ.
       9.  Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee.
      10.  Sermon on Mount.
      11.  Giving Keys to St. Peter.
      12.  Last Supper.

Of these pictures, Sandro painted three himself, Perugino three, and the Assumption; Ghirlandajo one, Signorelli one, and Rosselli four.[BA] I believe that Sandro intended to take the roof also, and had sketched out the main succession of its design; and that the prophets and sibyls which he meant to paint, he drew first small, and engraved his drawings afterwards, that some part of the work might be, at all events, thus communicable to the world outside of the Vatican.

210.  It is not often that I tell you my beliefs; but I am forced here, for there are no dates to found more on.  Is it not wonderful that among all the infinite mass of fools’ thoughts about the “majestic works of Michael Angelo” in the Sistine Chapel, no slightly more rational person has ever asked what the chapel was first meant to be like, and how it was to be roofed?

Nor can I assume myself, still less you, that all these prophets and sibyls are Botticelli’s.  Of many there are two engravings, with variations:  some are inferior in parts, many altogether.  He signed none; never put grand tablets with ‘S.  B.’ into his skies; had other letters than those to engrave, and no time to spare.  I have chosen out of the series three of the sibyls, which have, I think, clear internal evidence of being his; and these you shall compare with Michael Angelo’s.  But first I must put you in mind what the sibyls were.

211.  As the prophets represent the voice of God in man, the sibyls represent the voice of God in nature.  They are properly all forms of one sibyl, [Greek:  Dios Boule], the counsel of God; and the chief one, at least in the Roman mind, was the Sibyl of Cumae.  From the traditions of her, the Romans, and we through them, received whatever lessons the myth, or fact, of sibyl power has given to mortals.

How much have you received, or may you yet receive, think you, of that teaching?  I call it the myth, or fact; but remember that, as a myth, it is a fact.  This story has concentrated whatever good there is in the imagination or visionary powers in women, inspired by nature only.  The traditions of witch and gypsy are partly its offshoots.  You despise both, perhaps.  But can you, though in utmost pride of your supreme modern wisdom, suppose that the character ­say, even of so poor and far-fallen a sibyl as Meg Merrilies ­is only the coinage of Scott’s brain; or that, even being no more, it is valueless?  Admit the figure of the Cumaean Sibyl, in like manner, to be the coinage only of Virgil’s brain.  As such, it, and the words it speaks, are yet facts in which we may find use, if we are reverent to them.

To me, personally, (I must take your indulgence for a moment to speak wholly of myself,) they have been of the truest service ­quite material and indisputable.

I am writing on St. John’s Day, in the monastery of Assisi; and I had no idea whatever, when I sat down to my work this morning, of saying any word of what I am now going to tell you.  I meant only to expand and explain a little what I said in my lecture about the Florentine engraving.  But it seems to me now that I had better tell you what the Cumaean Sibyl has actually done for me.

212.  In 1871, partly in consequence of chagrin at the Revolution in Paris, and partly in great personal sorrow, I was struck by acute inflammatory illness at Matlock, and reduced to a state of extreme weakness; lying at one time unconscious for some hours, those about me having no hope of my life.  I have no doubt that the immediate cause of the illness was simply, eating when I was not hungry; so that modern science would acknowledge nothing in the whole business but an extreme and very dangerous form of indigestion; and entirely deny any interference of the Cumaean Sibyl in the matter.

I once heard a sermon by Dr. Guthrie, in Edinburgh, upon the wickedness of fasting.  It was very eloquent and ingenious, and finely explained the superiority of the Scotch Free Church to the benighted Catholic Church, in that the Free Church saw no merit in fasting.  And there was no mention, from beginning to end of the sermon, of even the existence of such texts as Daniel , or Matthew v.

Without the smallest merit, I admit, in fasting, I was nevertheless reduced at Matlock to a state very near starvation; and could not rise from my pillow, without being lifted, for some days.  And in the first clearly pronounced stage of recovery, when the perfect powers of spirit had returned, while the body was still as weak as it well could be, I had three dreams, which made a great impression on me; for in ordinary health my dreams are supremely ridiculous, if not unpleasant; and in ordinary conditions of illness, very ugly, and always without the slightest meaning.  But these dreams were all distinct and impressive, and had much meaning, if I chose to take it.

213.  The first[BB] was of a Venetian fisherman, who wanted me to follow him down into some water which I thought was too deep; but he called me on, saying he had something to show me; so I followed him; and presently, through an opening, as if in the arsenal wall, he showed me the bronze horses of St. Mark’s, and said, ’See, the horses are putting on their harness.’

The second was of a preparation at Rome, in St. Peter’s, (or a vast hall as large as St. Peter’s,) for the exhibition of a religious drama.  Part of the play was to be a scene in which demons were to appear in the sky; and the stage servants were arranging gray fictitious clouds, and painted fiends, for it, under the direction of the priests.  There was a woman dressed in black, standing at the corner of the stage watching them, having a likeness in her face to one of my own dead friends; and I knew somehow that she was not that friend, but a spirit; and she made me understand, without speaking, that I was to watch, for the play would turn out other than the priests expected.  And I waited; and when the scene came on, the clouds became real clouds, and the fiends real fiends, agitating them in slow quivering, wild and terrible, over the heads of the people and priests.  I recollected distinctly, however, when I woke, only the figure of the black woman mocking the people, and of one priest in an agony of terror, with the sweat pouring from his brow, but violently scolding one of the stage servants for having failed in some ceremony, the omission of which, he thought, had given the devils their power.

The third dream was the most interesting and personal.  Some one came to me to ask me to help in the deliverance of a company of Italian prisoners who were to be ransomed for money.  I said I had no money.  They answered, Yes, I had some that belonged to me as a brother of St. Francis, if I would give it up.  I said I did not know even that I was a brother of St. Francis; but I thought to myself, that perhaps the Franciscans of Fesole, whom I had helped to make hay in their field in 1845, had adopted me for one; only I didn’t see how the consequence of that would be my having any money.  However, I said they were welcome to whatever I had; and then I heard the voice of an Italian woman singing; and I have never heard such divine singing before nor since; ­the sounds absolutely strong and real, and the melody altogether lovely.  If I could have written it!  But I could not even remember it when I woke, ­only how beautiful it was.

214.  Now these three dreams have, every one of them, been of much use to me since; or so far as they have failed to be useful, it has been my own fault, and not theirs; but the chief use of them at the time was to give me courage and confidence in myself, both in bodily distress, of which I had still not a little to bear; and worse, much mental anxiety about matters supremely interesting to me, which were turning out ill.  And through all such trouble ­which came upon me as I was recovering, as if it meant to throw me back into the grave, ­I held out and recovered, repeating always to myself, or rather having always murmured in my ears, at every new trial, one Latin line,

    Tu ne cede malis, sed contra fortior ito.

Now I had got this line out of the tablet in the engraving of Raphael’s vision, and had forgotten where it came from.  And I thought I knew my sixth book of Virgil so well, that I never looked at it again while I was giving these lectures at Oxford, and it was only here at Assisi, the other day, wanting to look more accurately at the first scene by the lake Avernus, that I found I had been saved by the words of the Cumaean Sibyl.

215.  “Quam tua te Fortuna sinet,” the completion of the sentence, has yet more and continual teaching in it for me now; as it has for all men.  Her opening words, which have become hackneyed, and lost all present power through vulgar use of them, contain yet one of the most immortal truths ever yet spoken for mankind; and they will never lose their power of help for noble persons.  But observe, both in that lesson, “Facilis descensus Averni,” etc.; and in the still more precious, because universal, one on which the strength of Rome was founded, ­the burning of the books, ­the Sibyl speaks only as the voice of Nature, and of her laws; ­not as a divine helper, prevailing over death; but as a mortal teacher warning us against it, and strengthening us for our mortal time; but not for eternity.  Of which lesson her own history is a part, and her habitation by the Avernus lake.  She desires immortality, fondly and vainly, as we do ourselves.  She receives, from the love of her refused lover, Apollo, not immortality, but length of life; ­her years to be as the grains of dust in her hand.  And even this she finds was a false desire; and her wise and holy desire at last is ­to die.  She wastes away; becomes a shade only, and a voice.  The Nations ask her, What wouldst thou?  She answers, Peace; only let my last words be true.  “L’ultimo mie parlar sie verace.”

216.  Therefore, if anything is to be conceived, rightly, and chiefly, in the form of the Cumaean Sibyl, it must be of fading virginal beauty, of enduring patience, of far-looking into futurity.  “For after my death there shall yet return,” she says, “another virgin.”

    Jam redit et virgo; ­redeunt Saturnia regna,
    Ultima Cumaei venit jam carminis aetas.

Here then is Botticelli’s Cumaean Sibyl.  She is armed, for she is the prophetess of Roman fortitude; ­but her faded breast scarcely raises the corselet; her hair floats, not falls, in waves like the currents of a river, ­the sign of enduring life; the light is full on her forehead:  she looks into the distance as in a dream.  It is impossible for art to gather together more beautifully or intensely every image which can express her true power, or lead us to understand her lesson.

The Nymph beloved of Apollo.

217.  Now you do not, I am well assured, know one of Michael Angelo’s sibyls from another:  unless perhaps the Delphian, whom of course he makes as beautiful as he can.  But of this especially Italian prophetess, one would have thought he might, at least in some way, have shown that he knew the history, even if he did not understand it.  She might have had more than one book, at all events, to burn.  She might have had a stray leaf or two fallen at her feet.  He could not indeed have painted her only as a voice; but his anatomical knowledge need not have hindered him from painting her virginal youth, or her wasting and watching age, or her inspired hope of a holier future.

218.  Opposite, ­fortunately, photograph from the figure itself, so that you can suspect me of no exaggeration, ­is Michael Angelo’s Cumaean Sibyl, wasting away.  It is by a grotesque and most strange chance that he should have made the figure of this Sibyl, of all others in the chapel, the most fleshly and gross, even proceeding to the monstrous license of showing the nipples of the breast as if the dress were molded over them like plaster.  Thus he paints the poor nymph beloved of Apollo, ­the clearest and queenliest in prophecy and command of all the sibyls, ­as an ugly crone, with the arms of Goliath, poring down upon a single book.

219.  There is one point of fine detail, however, in Botticelli’s Cumaean Sibyl, and in the next I am going to show you, to explain which I must go back for a little while to the question of the direct relation of the Italian painters to the Greek.  I don’t like repeating in one lecture what I have said in another; but to save you the trouble of reference, must remind you of what I stated in my fourth lecture on Greek birds, when we were examining the adoption of the plume crests in armor, that the crest signifies command; but the diadem, obedience; and that every crown is primarily a diadem.  It is the thing that binds, before it is the thing that honors.

Now all the great schools dwell on this symbolism.  The long flowing hair is the symbol of life, and the [Greek:  diadema] of the law restraining it.  Royalty, or kingliness, over life, restraining and glorifying.  In the extremity of restraint ­in death, whether noble, as of death to Earth, or ignoble, as of death to Heaven, the [Greek:  diadema] is fastened with the mort-cloth:  “Bound hand and foot with grave-clothes, and the face bound about with the napkin.”

220.  Now look back to the first Greek head I ever showed you, used as the type of archaic sculpture in Aratra Pentelici, and then look at the crown in Botticelli’s Astrologia.  It is absolutely the Greek form, ­even to the peculiar oval of the forehead; while the diadem ­the governing law ­is set with appointed stars ­to rule the destiny and thought.  Then return to the Cumaean Sibyl.  She, as we have seen, is the symbol of enduring life ­almost immortal.  The diadem is withdrawn from the forehead ­reduced to a narrow fillet ­here, and the hair thrown free.

221.  From the Cumaean Sibyl’s diadem, traced only by points, turn to that of the Hellespontic, (Plate 9, opposite).  I do not know why Botticelli chose her for the spirit of prophecy in old age; but he has made this the most interesting plate of the series in the definiteness of its connection with the work from Dante, which becomes his own prophecy in old age.  The fantastic yet solemn treatment of the gnarled wood occurs, as far as I know, in no other engravings but this, and the illustrations to Dante; and I am content to leave it, with little comment, for the reader’s quiet study, as showing the exuberance of imagination which other men at this time in Italy allowed to waste itself in idle arabesque, restrained by Botticelli to his most earnest purposes; and giving the withered tree-trunks, hewn for the rude throne of the aged prophetess, the same harmony with her fading spirit which the rose has with youth, or the laurel with victory.  Also in its weird characters, you have the best example I can show you of the orders of decorative design which are especially expressible by engraving, and which belong to a group of art instincts scarcely now to be understood, much less recovered, (the influence of modern naturalistic imitation being too strong to be conquered) ­the instincts, namely, for the arrangement of pure line, in labyrinthine intricacy, through which the grace of order may give continual clue.  The entire body of ornamental design, connected with writing, in the Middle Ages seems as if it were a sensible symbol, to the eye and brain, of the methods of error and recovery, the minglings of crooked with straight, and perverse with progressive, which constitute the great problem of human morals and fate; and when I chose the title for the collected series of these lectures, I hoped to have justified it by careful analysis of the methods of labyrinthine ornament, which, made sacred by Theseian traditions,[BC] and beginning, in imitation of physical truth, with the spiral waves of the waters of Babylon as the Assyrian carved them, entangled in their returns the eyes of men, on Greek vase and Christian manuscript ­till they closed in the arabesques which sprang round the last luxury of Venice and Rome.

But the labyrinth of life itself, and its more and more interwoven occupation, become too manifold, and too difficult for me; and of the time wasted in the blind lanes of it, perhaps that spent in analysis or recommendation of the art to which men’s present conduct makes them insensible, has been chiefly cast away.  On the walls of the little room where I finally revise this lecture,[BD] hangs an old silken sampler of great-grandame’s work:  representing the domestic life of Abraham:  chiefly the stories of Isaac and Ishmael.  Sarah at her tent-door, watching, with folded arms, the dismissal of Hagar:  above, in a wilderness full of fruit trees, birds, and butterflies, little Ishmael lying at the root of a tree, and the spent bottle under another; Hagar in prayer, and the angel appearing to her out of a wreathed line of gloomily undulating clouds, which, with a dark-rayed sun in the midst, surmount the entire composition in two arches, out of which descend shafts of (I suppose) beneficent rain; leaving, however, room, in the corner opposite to Ishmael’s angel, for Isaac’s, who stays Abraham in the sacrifice; the ram in the thicket, the squirrel in the plum tree above him, and the grapes, pears, apples, roses, and daisies of the foreground, being all wrought with involution of such ingenious needlework as may well rank, in the patience, the natural skill, and the innocent pleasure of it, with the truest works of Florentine engraving.  Nay; the actual tradition of many of the forms of ancient art is in many places evident, ­as, for instance, in the spiral summits of the flames of the wood on the altar, which are like a group of first-springing fern.  On the wall opposite is a smaller composition, representing Justice with her balance and sword, standing between the sun and moon, with a background of pinks, borage, and corn-cockle:  a third is only a cluster of tulips and iris, with two Byzantine peacocks; but the spirits of Penelope and Ariadne reign vivid in all the work ­and the richness of pleasurable fancy is as great still, in these silken labors, as in the marble arches and golden roof of the cathedral of Monreale.

But what is the use of explaining or analyzing it?  Such work as this means the patience and simplicity of all feminine life; and can be produced, among us at least, no more.  Gothic tracery itself, another of the instinctive labyrinthine intricacies of old, though analyzed to its last section, has become now the symbol only of a foolish ecclesiastical sect, retained for their shibboleth, joyless and powerless for all good.  The very labyrinth of the grass and flowers of our fields, though dissected to its last leaf, is yet bitten bare, or trampled to slime, by the Minotaur of our lust; and for the traceried spire of the poplar by the brook, we possess but the four-square furnace tower, to mingle its smoke with heaven’s thunder-clouds.[BE]

We will look yet at one sampler more of the engraved work, done in the happy time when flowers were pure, youth simple, and imagination gay, ­Botticelli’s Libyan Sibyl.

Glance back first to the Hellespontic, noting the close fillet, and the cloth bound below the face, and then you will be prepared to understand the last I shall show you, and the loveliest of the southern Pythonesses.

222.  A less deep thinker than Botticelli would have made her parched with thirst, and burnt with heat.  But the voice of God, through nature, to the Arab or the Moor, is not in the thirst, but in the fountain ­not in the desert, but in the grass of it.  And this Libyan Sibyl is the spirit of wild grass and flowers, springing in desolate places.

You see, her diadem is a wreath of them; but the blossoms of it are not fastening enough for her hair, though it is not long yet ­(she is only in reality a Florentine girl of fourteen or fifteen) ­so the little darling knots it under her ears, and then makes herself a necklace of it.  But though flowing hair and flowers are wild and pretty, Botticelli had not, in these only, got the power of Spring marked to his mind.  Any girl might wear flowers; but few, for ornament, would be likely to wear grass.  So the Sibyl shall have grass in her diadem; not merely interwoven and bending, but springing and strong.  You thought it ugly and grotesque at first, did not you?  It was made so, because precisely what Botticelli wanted you to look at.

But that’s not all.  This conical cap of hers, with one bead at the top, ­considering how fond the Florentines are of graceful head-dresses, this seems a strange one for a young girl.  But, exactly as I know the angel of Victory to be Greek, at his Mount of Pity, so I know this head-dress to be taken from a Greek coin, and to be meant for a Greek symbol.  It is the Petasus of Hermes ­the mist of morning over the dew.  Lastly, what will the Libyan Sibyl say to you?  The letters are large on her tablet.  Her message is the oracle from the temple of the Dew:  “The dew of thy birth is as the womb of the morning.” ­“Ecce venientem diem, et latentia aperientem, tenebit gremio gentium regina.”

223.  Why the daybreak came not then, nor yet has come, but only a deeper darkness; and why there is now neither queen nor king of nations, but every man doing that which is right in his own eyes, I would fain go on, partly to tell you, and partly to meditate with you:  but it is not our work for to-day.  The issue of the Reformation which these great painters, the scholars of Dante, began, we may follow, farther, in the study to which I propose to lead you, of the lives of Cimabue and Giotto, and the relation of their work at Assisi to the chapel and chambers of the Vatican.

224.  To-day let me finish what I have to tell you of the style of southern engraving.  What sudden bathos in the sentence, you think!  So contemptible the question of style, then, in painting, though not in literature?  You study the ‘style’ of Homer; the style, perhaps, of Isaiah; the style of Horace, and of Massillon.  Is it so vain to study the style of Botticelli?

In all cases, it is equally vain, if you think of their style first.  But know their purpose, and then, their way of speaking is worth thinking of.  These apparently unfinished and certainly unfilled outlines of the Florentine, ­clumsy work, as Vasari thought them, ­as Mr. Otley and most of our English amateurs still think them, ­are these good or bad engraving?

You may ask now, comprehending their motive, with some hope of answering or being answered rightly.  And the answer is, They are the finest gravers’ work ever done yet by human hand.  You may teach, by process of discipline and of years, any youth of good artistic capacity to engrave a plate in the modern manner; but only the noblest passion, and the tenderest patience, will ever engrave one line like these of Sandro Botticelli.

225.  Passion, and patience!  Nay, even these you may have to-day in England, and yet both be in vain.  Only a few years ago, in one of our northern iron-foundries, a workman of intense power and natural art-faculty set himself to learn engraving; ­made his own tools; gave all the spare hours of his laborious life to learn their use; learnt it; and engraved a plate which, in manipulation, no professional engraver would be ashamed of.  He engraved his blast furnace, and the casting of a beam of a steam engine.  This, to him, was the power of God, ­it was his life.  No greater earnestness was ever given by man to promulgate a Gospel.  Nevertheless, the engraving is absolutely worthless.  The blast furnace is not the power of God; and the life of the strong spirit was as much consumed in the flames of it, as ever driven slave’s by the burden and heat of the day.

How cruel to say so, if he yet lives, you think!  No, my friends; the cruelty will be in you, and the guilt, if, having been brought here to learn that God is your Light, you yet leave the blast furnace to be the only light of England.

226.  It has been, as I said in the note above (Se, with extreme pain that I have hitherto limited my notice of our own great engraver and moralist, to the points in which the disadvantages of English art-teaching made him inferior to his trained Florentine rival.  But, that these disadvantages were powerless to arrest or ignobly depress him; ­that however failing in grace and scholarship, he should never fail in truth or vitality; and that the precision of his unerring hand[BF] ­his inevitable eye ­and his rightly judging heart ­should place him in the first rank of the great artists not of England only, but of all the world and of all time: ­that this was possible to him, was simply because he lived a country life.  Bewick himself, Botticelli himself, Apelles himself, and twenty times Apelles, condemned to slavery in the hell-fire of the iron furnace, could have done ­NOTHING.  Absolute paralysis of all high human faculty must result from labor near fire.  The poor engraver of the piston-rod had faculties ­not like Bewick’s, for if he had had those, he never would have endured the degradation; but assuredly, (I know this by his work,) faculties high enough to have made him one of the most accomplished figure painters of his age.  And they are scorched out of him, as the sap from the grass in the oven:  while on his Northumberland hill-sides, Bewick grew into as stately life as their strongest pine.

227.  And therefore, in words of his, telling consummate and unchanging truth concerning the life, honor, and happiness of England, and bearing directly on the points of difference between class and class which I have not dwelt on without need, I will bring these lectures to a close.

“I have always, through life, been of opinion that there is no business of any kind that can be compared to that of a man who farms his own land.  It appears to me that every earthly pleasure, with health, is within his reach.  But numbers of these men (the old statesmen) were grossly ignorant, and in exact proportion to that ignorance they were sure to be offensively proud.  This led them to attempt appearing above their station, which hastened them on to their ruin; but, indeed, this disposition and this kind of conduct invariably leads to such results.  There were many of these lairds on Tyneside; as well as many who held their lands on the tenure of ‘suit and service,’ and were nearly on the same level as the lairds.  Some of the latter lost their lands (not fairly, I think) in a way they could not help; many of the former, by their misdirected pride and folly, were driven into towns, to slide away into nothingness, and to sink into oblivion, while their ‘ha’ houses’ (halls), that ought to have remained in their families from generation to generation, have moldered away.  I have always felt extremely grieved to see the ancient mansions of many of the country gentlemen, from somewhat similar causes, meet with a similar fate.  The gentry should, in an especial manner, prove by their conduct that they are guarded against showing any symptom of foolish pride; at the same time that they soar above every meanness, and that their conduct is guided by truth, integrity, and patriotism.  If they wish the people to partake with them in these good qualities, they must set them the example, without which no real respect can ever be paid to them.  Gentlemen ought never to forget the respectable station they hold in society, and that they are the natural guardians of public morals and may with propriety be considered as the head and the heart of the country, while ’a bold peasantry’ are, in truth, the arms, the sinews, and the strength of the same; but when these last are degraded, they soon become dispirited and mean, and often dishonest and useless.”

“This singular and worthy man[BG] was perhaps the most invaluable acquaintance and friend I ever met with.  His moral lectures and advice to me formed a most important succedaneum to those imparted by my parents.  His wise remarks, his detestation of vice, his industry, and his temperance, crowned with a most lively and cheerful disposition, altogether made him appear to me as one of the best of characters.  In his workshop I often spent my winter evenings.  This was also the case with a number of young men who might be considered as his pupils; many of whom, I have no doubt, he directed into the paths of truth and integrity, and who revered his memory through life.  He rose early to work, lay down when he felt weary, and rose again when refreshed.  His diet was of the simplest kind; and he ate when hungry, and drank when dry, without paying regard to meal-times.  By steadily pursuing this mode of life he was enabled to accumulate sums of money ­from ten to thirty pounds.  This enabled him to get books, of an entertaining and moral tendency, printed and circulated at a cheap rate.  His great object was, by every possible means, to promote honorable feelings in the minds of youth, and to prepare them for becoming good members of society.  I have often discovered that he did not overlook ingenious mechanics, whose misfortunes ­perhaps mismanagement ­had led them to a lodging in Newgate.  To these he directed his compassionate eye, and for the deserving (in his estimation), he paid their debt, and set them at liberty.  He felt hurt at seeing the hands of an ingenious man tied up in prison, where they were of no use either to himself or to the community.  This worthy man had been educated for a priest; but he would say to me, ‘Of a “trouth,” Thomas, I did not like their ways.’  So he gave up the thoughts of being a priest, and bent his way from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, where he engaged himself to Allan Ramsay, the poet, then a bookseller at the latter place, in whose service he was both shopman and bookbinder.  From Edinburgh he came to Newcastle.  Gilbert had had a liberal education bestowed upon him.  He had read a great deal, and had reflected upon what he had read.  This, with his retentive memory, enabled him to be a pleasant and communicative companion.  I lived in habits of intimacy with him to the end of his life; and, when he died, I, with others of his friends, attended his remains to the grave at the Ballast Hills.”

And what graving on the sacred cliffs of Egypt ever honored them, as that grass-dimmed furrow does the mounds of our Northern land?