with their fallen fellows. Another careful sketch is that of Dædalus building up the hollow wooden cow for Pasiphae; the strange machine is well-nigh perfect; a whole troop of Loves lend helping hands to the work, sawing wood, whetting steel, doing all manner of carpentry, with light feet and laughing faces full of their mother's mirth.

Of Sodoma, again, there is but one example; it may be that Vasari's well-known and memorable ill-will towards the great Sienese excluded others from his collection, if indeed this one came from thence. It is a beautiful and elaborate drawing, partly coloured; a boy with full wavy curls, crowned with leaves, wearing a red dress banded with gold and black and fringed with speckled fur; the large bright eyes and glad fresh lips animate the beauty of the face; Razzi1 never painted a fairer, full as his works are of fair forms and faces.

I may here, as well as anywhere else among these disconnected notes, turn to the samples of German work in this collection; to the sketches of Durer, Holbein, and Mabuse, which have found favour in Italian eyes. Two studies of the Passion by Durer are noticeable; in this Christ is bearing the cross, in that sinking under it; the press of the crowd, the fashion of the portcullis, recall the birthplace and the habit of the master. From his hand we have also secular and allegoric sketches; one a design for the famous figure of Fortune; an old man's

Bazzi, as the last Sienese guide-book will needs have him called; Razzi or Bazzi, Sodoma or Sodona, the name of St. Catherine's great painter seems doomed to remain a riddle. Happily the beauty of his work is no such open question, so that the name matters little enough.

head with heavy lips and nose, a collar tied loose round the large throat; another head, bearded and supine; slight studies of man and horse and child; a Deposition of Christ, and a Burial, with fine realistic landscape hard by the city walls; a man beheading a woman, who in the act grasps hard the doomed head with his unarmed left hand. By Mabuse there is a quaint horror in the way of martyrology; the boiling of some saint in a vessel like a kitchen-pot, while one tormentor scalds his head with water or oil or molten metal out of a little bucket at the end of a pole. Mabuse in his sketches has revelled in the ways and works of hangmen, seen in a grim broad light of German laughter; their quaint gestures and quaint implements have a ludicrous and bloody look; observe another pot with rings round it, ominous and simple in make, and the boy staring with strained eyes. These fine sharp caricatures of torturers might serve a modern eye as studies for Henriet Cousin of "Notre-Dame de Paris" or Master Hansen of "Sidonia ;" there is a stupid funereal fun in the brute mechanism of their aspect. He has also a really fine drawing of a saint stepping into his own grave, made ready in a chapel before the altar. Martin Schöngauer too has left a good female head with ample hair, and a strong hard design of a knight and devil in deadly grapple. A head after Holbein is unmistakeable; the hair is thick, the chin long, the fine lips fretted and keen. Not far off is the only waif of Spanish art I find here; chalk by Velasquez, with large eyes and red lips, the upper lip thin.

a head sketched in

I turn back to Florence for my last note; to one of

her dearest and noblest names, reserved with love for this last place. With the majestic and the tragic things of art we began, at the landmarks set by Leonardo and Michel Angelo; and are come now, not quite at random, to the lyric and elegiac loveliness of Andrea del Sarto. To praise him would need sweeter and purer speech than this of ours. His art is to me as the Tuscan April in its temperate days, fresh and tender and clear, but lulled and kindled by such air and light as fills the life of the growing year with fire. At Florence only can one trace and tell how great a painter and how various he was. There only but surely there can the influence and pressure of the things of time on his immortal spirit be understood; how much of him was killed or changed, how much of him could not be. There are the first-fruits of his flowering manhood, when the bright and buoyant genius in him had free play and large delight in its handiwork; when the fresh interest of invention was still his, and the dramatic sense, the pleasure in the play of life, the power of motion and variety; before the old strength of sight and of flight had passed from weary wing and clouding eye, the old pride and energy of enjoyment had gone out of hand and heart. How the change fell upon him, and how it wrought, any one may see who compares his later with his earlier work; with the series, for instance, of outlines representing the story of St. John Baptist in the desolate little cloister of Lo Scalzo. In these mural designs there is such exultation and exuberance of young power, of fresh passion and imagination, that only by the innate grace can one recognise the hand of the master whom hitherto we knew by the works of his after life,

when the gift of grace had survived the gift of invention. This and all other gifts it did survive; all pleasure of life and power of mind, all the conscience of the man, his will, his character, his troubles, his triumphs, his sin and honour, heart-break and shame. All these his charm of touch, his sweetness of execution, his "Elysian beauty, melancholy grace," outlived, and blossomed in their dust. Turn from that cloistral series to those later pictures painted when he was "faultless" and nothing more; and seeing all the growth and all the gain, all the change and all the loss, one to whom the record was unknown would feel and foreknow his story and his sorrow. In the cloister, what life and fullness of growing and strengthening genius, what joyous sense of its growth and the fair field before it, what dramatic delight in character and action! where St. John preaches in the wilderness and the few first listeners are gathered together at his feet, old people and poor, soul-stricken, silent-women with worn still faces, and a spirit in their tired aged eyes that feeds heartily and hungrily on his words-all the haggard funereal group filled from the fountain of his faith with gradual fire and white-heat of soul; or where Salome dances before Herod, an incarnate figure of music, grave and graceful, light and glad, the song of a bird made flesh, with perfect poise of her sweet slight body from the maiden face to the melodious feet; no tyrannous or treacherous goddess of deadly beauty, but a simple virgin, with the cold charm of girlhood and the mobile charm of childhood; as indifferent and innocent when she stands before Herodias and when she receives the severed head of John with her slender and steady hands; a pure

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bright animal, knowing nothing of man, and of life nothing but instinct and motion. In her mother's mature and conscious beauty there is visible the voluptuous will of a harlot and a queen ; but, for herself, she has neither malice nor pity; her beauty is a maiden force of nature, capable of bloodshed without bloodguiltiness; the king hangs upon the music of her movement, the rhythm of leaping life in her fair fleet limbs, as one who listens to a tune, subdued by the rapture of sound, absorbed in purity of passion. I know not where the subject has been touched with such fine and keen imagination as here. The time came when another than Salome was to dance before the eyes of the painter; and she required of him the head of no man, but his own soul; and he paid the forfeit into her hands. With the coming of that time upon him came the change upon his heart and hand; "the work of an imperious whorish woman." Those words, set by the prophet as a brand upon the fallen forehead of the chosen bride, come back to mind as one studies in her husband's pictures the full calm lineaments, the large and serene beauty of Lucrezia del Fede; a predominant and placid beauty, placid and implacable, not to be pleaded with or fought against. Voluptuous always and slothful, subtle at times no doubt and sweet beyond measure, full of heavy beauty and warm slow grace, her features bear no sign of possible love or conscience. Seen side by side with his clear sad face, hers tells more of the story than any written record, even though two poets of our age have taken it up. In the feverish and feeble melodrama of Alfred de Musset there is no touch of tragedy, hardly a shadow of passionate and piteous truth; in Mr.