there, was married to a wife who, as his friend Pirkheimer said, hunted him to death, how he journeyed once to Venice, and again to the Low Countries. This, with the catalogue of his works, is the substance of our knowledge of Albrecht Dürer, foremost master of German art. Dr. von Eye* has not enlarged the picture, nor has he done much to fill up the shadowy outlines which float down to us out of the ages. Dürer has painted his own portrait best, as it looks down upon you in the silent halls of the great Pinakothek in Munich, with the rich, full chestnut locks, and the face which discloses better than words the inner character of the man. A poor goldsmith, wandering from Hungary through Germany and the Low Countries, the father of Albrecht Dürer settled at last among the artists of Nuremberg, where his life was to flow quietly on to its close. For twelve years he worked with Hieronymus Haller, and then, as the reward of his perseverance and skill, received at once the freedom of the guild and his master's daughter, Barbara, in marriage, he then in his fortieth year, she but fifteen. In the Pinakothek in Munich there is a portrait of the elder Dürer painted by his son in the year 1497; —a tall, somewhat spare form, already showing the pressure of the years, the toilsome hands, folded as if in welcome rest, and in his face a look of earnestness and resignation which justifies the words of the son: "He did not have much to do with the joy of this world, was of few words and little company, and a God-fearing man." On the 21st of May, 1471, was born his son Albrecht, second son and the third of eighteen children. The house in which he was born you may see to this day in Nuremberg, in the narrow little street called the Winklerstrasse, in the rear of the Pirkheimer residence, a dark little house which the sun seldom lighted, especially in winter, when they stopped up the openings which served for windows with oil paper, window-panes being a luxury confined to more imposing mansions in those days. Not long before the little Albrecht saw the light, there was born to the Pirkheimers a son whom they called Willibald, and who afterwards became a statesman, scholar, and co-worker in that great movement of the Reformation which began to shake the world in the latter years of his life, but best known to us as the early and constant friend of the child Albrecht, with whom he grew up in closest intimacy. It was a pretty open place those boys played together in so long ago, - all kept as of old for you to gaze at it, with the stately buildings round it, in the background the colored façade of the Frauen Kirche, in the foreground "the beautiful fountain," all gilded and glittering, and around them the busy life of Nuremberg in the market-days. Dürer must have shown his genius early, for there exists still a portrait of him drawn by himself when only thirteen years old. In his fifteenth year he was sent as a pupil to Michael Wohlgemuth, and when he had served his time his father sent him to wander about to see the world. And he wandered for four years, years, unfortunately, of which no record has been kept for us. Even at this early period his * Leben und Wirken ALBRECHT DÜRER'S. Von Dr. A. v. EYE. Nördlingen: Druck und Verlag der C. H. Beck'schen Buchhandlung. 1860. character seems to have made an impression upon his contemporaries. Melancthon said of him that his art, however remarkable, was the least part of him. An aspiring, earnest soul, a comely person withal, - it pains one to read these brief words of his: "And when I came home, Hans Frey bargains with my father and gave me his daughter, Agnes by name, in marriage." It was the way of the age. "The daughters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were rather rough children of nature," says Dr. von Eye, healthy, but less fascinating than we picture them, and altogether without schooling." 66 It was an unfortunate affair for Dürer, without children as it proved, which the genial companionship of Pirkheimer did not altogether assuage. The marriage took place on the 7th of July, 1494, and they went to live in a house at the upper end of the street now called after his name, known ever after as Dürer's house. Bought by the magistracy of the city, it has been intrusted to the Nuremberg Art Union Society, by whom it is occupied. Since Dürer's time it has suffered a good deal of change internally, but there is enough of it left to show how much less comfortably people lived in those days than in these, says Dr. von Eye. Outwardly, it is the same as it looked to the new couple that July morning, when, we dare say, Agnes Dürer had not begun to show that objectionable temper of hers. Dürer's workroom seems to have been a moderately large one on the ground floor, with a single broad window, rounded at the top, toward the north, with the tall, dark city wall rising up close against it. In the ceiling is a grated opening connecting with the upper chamber, through which his wife used to watch him, says your cicerone. Till 1502, father and son worked together; then was the former called away. "And when he saw death before his eyes, he yielded willingly, with great patience, and recommended to me my mother, and that we should lead godly lives. Then he received the sacrament and departed like a Christian, to whom God be gracious and compassionate." For two years longer his mother lived in her old house, and when she had consumed her substance, and was very poor, she went to live with Albrecht, whose pious charge she became till her death in 1514. And now Dürer went to Venice, as is related in the fourth chapter of our work. And how he travelled and what he did one may get some notion from the eight letters which have survived to us, directed to the "Ersamen weisen Her Wilbolt Pirkamer." They have been printed, and are well known to all who know Dürer and his life. It was from Venice that Dürer sent Raphael a portrait of himself, with other drawings, at sight of which Raphael said, "Of a truth this man would surpass us all, if like us he had the masterpieces of art before his eyes," and sent back his own likeness. After his return from Venice, from 1507 to 1513, was the flowering-time (Blüthezeit) of Dürer's life, for the bud had ripened fast under the soft Italian sky, with Giovanni Bellini to care for it. On the 12th of July, 1520, accompanied by his wife and his maid Susanna, Dürer set forth on a journey to the Low Countries. The next day he reached the Bamberg frontier fortress of Forchheim, and the Bishop of Bamberg, whose favor he won by the present of a picture of the Virgin, bestowed upon him what we may call a customs' pass, which helped him free through twenty-six custom-houses between Bamberg and Frankfort, so excessively was Germany cut up in those days into petty sovereignties. From Cologne he went to Antwerp, finding in the company of artists and great people what solace he might for his matrimonial infelicities. And as one reads the brief words of his diary, the impression is unavoidable that, on the whole, he had rather a good time of it. Erasmus of Rotterdam recognized the great worth of the man not less than the fame of the artist, and sent him a Spanish mantle. In return, Dürer drew a portrait of him, and later, in 1526, made that splendid copper engraving of him which the world still prizes. In October he went to Aix-la-Chapelle to witness the ceremony of the coronation of Charles V., and gather with the rest of his brethren what profit he might therefrom. We find in his diary at this period an entry which illumines for us the obscurity of his inner life. "Item. On the Friday before Whitsuntide, in the 1521st year, came news to Antwerp that Martin Luther had been treacherously made prisoner." And he relates how, and then continues: "And especially is it to me the hardest thing, that God will suffer us, perhaps, to remain still in that false, blind teaching which has been devised by the men whom they name Fathers, in which the precious word is in many things falsely interpreted, or not at all set forth. God in heaven have pity on us. If Luther be dead, who will illustrate for us so clearly the sacred Gospel?" As they had tried to keep Dürer in Venice, so they did now in Antwerp, better understanding his worth than they seem to have done in Nuremberg. The Council of Antwerp offered him a yearly salary of three hundred Philippsgulden, exemption from taxation, and a well-built house, and separate payment also for all the work he might do for them. "They do not spare money," he writes in his diary, "they have enough of it in Antwerp," and declines the offer. And now we come to the last years of Dürer's life, from 1521 to 1528. He went back to Nuremberg to toil on in the old way; but troubles were thickening in the land. There was something in the air which was making things over anew, - they called it the Reformation. The thinking men of Nuremberg, as elsewhere, greeted it as the needed and blessed thing, in spite of the anathemas which came thundering from Rome, against Willibald Pirkheimer among others. Among the labors which signalize these last years of Dürer's, are his scientific writings, which have not lost their value with time. His chief work, that upon the doctrine of proportion in the human body, published in 1528, has been translated into many languages. Camerarius said of Dürer: "If anything looked like a fault in this man, it was only his infinite industry and the severity which he exercised toward himself, which was often beyond measure." Erasmus prophesied his immortality. He rejoiced in Luther, and was the friend of Zwingli. To Melancthon he made the confession, that in his early days he liked striking forms and much color and his own works; but that in later life he began first to contemplate nature, and was led to the conviction that its simplicity was the best ornament of art, and that, no longer wondering at his own works, he sighed often that he could not attain to this simplicity of nature. For so does the ideal grow purer and so rise higher for every striving son of earth; and for Dürer the end was approaching. "When I was in Seeland," he writes, “I took on a wonderful sickness, of which I have heard from no man, and this sickness I have still." A fever, caught in the Low Countries, seems never to have left him, says Eye. In the spring of 1528 the evil grew worse. On the 6th of April, Albrecht Dürer's earthly career was closed. "He is gone, our Albrecht," writes Pirkheimer to a friend. "Let us weep, dear Ulrich, the inexorable destiny, the wretched fate of men, and the pitiless harshness of death! A noble man has been torn from us, while so many idle and worthless ones enjoy life still." He was buried in the Church of St. John, and Pirkheimer wrote the Latin inscription on the bronze plate on his grave, and two years afterwards was himself laid near his friend. His wife Agnes survived him eleven years, and died in a certain good odor, by reason of the bequest which she made of a yearly sum due her husband from the city of Nuremberg, for the support of poor Nuremberg theologues in the University at Wittenberg. They cherish Dürer's memory to this day in the good old city of Nuremberg. Each year, on his birthday, the artists and their friends celebrate simple rites at his grave; and the lover of German art will not fail to stride thither in his brief hour in the imperial city. And in the place called after his name there stands, since 1840, the great bronze statue by Rauch. What Albrecht Dürer did for German art, the critics will best explain, how he took it out of the bands which hitherto had swathed it, and drew it into the realm of higher life and deeper thought. But how he lived and toiled, of that indeed we get but a glimpse; but it tells the story of the face which looks out upon us from the past and makes us his friend. His portrait is his best biography. It is of Albrecht Dürer we think, perhaps, when we repeat the words of Klopstock: "Schön ist, Mutter Natur, deiner Erfindung Pracht Deiner schöpfung noch einmal denkt." THE life of the engineer of that splendid waste of money and skill, the Thames Tunnel,* has the interest not only of scientific achievement, but of personal character. A French loyalist, Brunel saved his head from the guillotine of the Revolution by flight with a forged passport to America. Here he became naturalized, engaged in surveying along Lake Ontario, surveyed a canal to connect Lake Champlain with * Memoir of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. By RICHARD BEAMISH. London: Longman & Co. 1862. the Hudson, drew a plan for the national Capitol, and another, a more successful one, for the Park Theatre, erected a cannon foundry in New York, and furnished designs for harbor improvements, which seem to have been poorly compensated. Not realizing the pecuniary reward due to such rare mechanic ability, Brunel sought the patronage of the English government. Having invented a machine for manufacturing the immense amount of blocks required in the rigging of ships, his improvements were interfered with, his originality questioned, his compensation made as small as possible, and his patience was tried to the uttermost. Still, his heroic perseverance triumphed over every obstacle; his inventive genius seemed to rise with difficulty; patents of very various kinds were secured by him, from a machine for shuffling playingcards to one that was to furnish the army with shoes independent of wax or thread. Yet his trials were exceedingly severe: not only did his Battersea Saw-Mills cast him into a debtors' prison, through his extravagant dependence upon incompetent partners, but his intended substitution of liquefied gas for steam, after the expenditure of a fortune and attracting the favorable notice of the scientific world, proved economically impossible. The Thames Tunnel was no failure as far as Brunel was concerned. Deceived in the nature of the soil through which he was to work, mistaken, as his sanguine mind generally was, regarding the cost, he accomplished, by copying the method of the insignificant shipworm, that wonder of modern art, which no other man living could have done, and which no other country is likely to imitate. Again and again the river burst in upon his workmen, drowning some, and dispersing the rest in a fright; funds entirely failed; the Chairman of the Board was hostile to Brunel; still, the intrepid engineer had no doubt of the result. His distinguished son, the builder of the Great Eastern steamer, aided to inspire the. exposed workmen with courage, patience, and hope, through every kind of delay and disappointment. As the biographer was an associate engineer in the completion of the Tunnel, this portion of the narrative is given with great spirit, and is admirably illustrated. THE handsome, amiable, and intelligent countenance which beams upon us in the frontispiece of the biography of the American Kirwan,* prepares even those who had not heard of that remarkable man to enjoy the volume of his "Memoirs." It will go far to contradict that prejudice which had imagined in the ardent foe of the Catholic Church only a sarcastic, venomous, and malignant bigot. In this memoir, Dr. Murray is shown as one of the most genial of friends, faithful of pastors, and industrious of workers, - not arrogant, harsh, or uncharitable, but kind even in his strong dogmatism. The single testimony of the editor of the New York Observer might not be allowed to decide the question of any man's charity; but Dr. Prime has judiciously added other witnesses, whose word is more weighty in a case of this kind, *Memoirs of the Rev. Nicholas Murray, D. D. (Kirwan). By SAMUEL IRENEUS PRIME. New York: Harper and Brothers. |