II. MISS ANGEL. By Miss Thackeray. Part II.,, Cornhill Magazine,

III. THOUGHTS ABOUT THINKING,

IV. THE STORY OF VALENTINE;
BROTHER. Part XXIII.,

V. EARLY KINGS OF NORWAY.
Carlyle,

AND HIS

By Thomas

Cornhill Magazine,

Blackwood's Magazine,.

Fraser's Magazine,

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON.

643

663

673

TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION.

For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY.

None closed the eyes, nor felt the latest We shall droop our wings, pipes the throstle breath.

E

From The Edinburgh Review.
LEONARDO DA VINCI.*

WHAT history is there of Christian
times which presents such endless
sources of thought to the philosopher,
such glorious visions of art and beauty
to the man of taste, such mournful won-
derment to the moralist, such insoluble
enigmas to all, as the history of Italy
towards the end of the fifteenth and dur-
ing the sixteenth centuries? Seen by
the light of subsequent times, there is
nothing so astonishing as the glory of
her apogee but the completeness of her
eclipse-as the pride of her height but
the humiliation of her fall,
as the splen-

ture but the

bond of the Italian race; while, towards the close of the fifteenth century, the spirit of local independence which had ensured the prosperity of her small states was rapidly becoming extinguished. Small republics, however internally wise and secure for a period, had never formed a nation; and, as the stronger coveted and obtained dominion over the weaker as Florence over Pisa-and they in their turn yielded to usurpers from within or without, the conception of a common patriotism, as of a common strength, ceased even on this limited scale to exist. That a sturdy patriotism still survived in fered in vain a line never extinct even a few lofty minds who struggled and sufdarkness of its reverse. The lowness of in her darkest hours is one of the most the level which she lay attractive touching features of this period of degraonly to friend and foe, to spoiler and ad-dation. But the immediate and most mirer, for the trophies mournful sign of the decay of "rich and time the most royal Italy" was the fact that the majorcontemptuous appellation a country can ity of her children ceased not to be gay bear, that of "a mere geographical ex- and happy even in her bondage. Nothpression" this was a stern and unmis-ing strikes us more than the enjoyment takable fact which endured for fully three of life and the activity of art and letters centuries. All inquiry, therefore, re- at a time and under conditions which solves itself into the question of the must have filled a loyal and thoughtful soundness of her immediately previous heart with the gravest forebodings. For prosperity; and no one can pursue the while the soil of Italy can produce, as it lives and careers of any of her grand and has never ceased to do, the noblest and gifted children within that epoch without most vigorous specimens of the human perceiving at every turn the deep hollow-plant, her sun has also fostered the most ness which underlay the lovely land at poisonous and ephemeral. Bondage, dethe very time

receiving even in our own her past

brilliant. When its surface was most pendence, and servility are as potent for

reasons for such corrup- the development of evil as liberty for tion and collapse were doubtless owing that of good. If we can imagine the mainly to the virtual absence of the vital light of our English freedom suddenly functions of a nation's health, and to the quenched, no result would be sadder to interruption of such as had supplied their behold than the number and the class of place. For that consciousness of a com- minds who would accommodate themmon country which the word "nation "selves to the degrading conditions, and implies had never been in one sense the

1. Saggio delle Opere di Leonardo da Vinci, con ventiquattro Tavole fotolitografiche di Scritture e Disegni, tratti del Codice Atlantico. Milano: 1872.

Edizione di 300 Exemplari.

find, as the Italians did, some congenial sunshine to live and flourish, to bask and buzz in. It is indeed but just to the Italian race to confess - what was evident to many even before their present revival, 2. Michel Ange, Leonard de Vinci, Raphael. Par and will not be disputed now that any CHARLES CLEMENT; avec une étude sur l'art en other European nation, once fallen so 3. Leonardo da Vinci and his Works; consisting of low, would have exhibited greater brutalA Life of Leonardo da Vinci, by Mrs. CHARLES W.ization of life and manners, though not HEATON; An Essay on his Scientific and Literary perhaps the same effeminacy and demorWorks, by CHARLES CHRISTOPHER BLACK, M.A.; and An Account of his most important Paintings. London: 1874.

Italie, avant le XVIème Siècle. Paris: 1861.

alization.

There were, however, secondary rea

sons for the indifference with which, | de courage chez les guerriers, peu de patowards the close of the fifteenth century, triotisme chez les citoyens." * signs of approaching evil were regarded

There was one great reality, however, and reasons more immediately percepti- surviving all those by which Italy had led ble and traceable. These lay partially in the van before every other nation in Euthe nature of the letters then cultivated, rope -a reality never more grand and as well as in the exclusive interest with splendid than at the period we are conwhich they were pursued. The brilliant sidering—which has bequeathed monuepoch of the study of classic authors ments of national genius unequalled which ensued on the dispersion of an- since, and in virtue of which she remains cient manuscripts in Italy, consequent on a lawgiver to the present day. This realthe taking of Constantinople by the Turks ity was her art. In this form of national (1453); the ardour with which the various life Italy continued, even to the end of centres of Italy and her most learned the sixteenth century, to be a great men vied with each other in classic inter-country, and her artists true patriots, for pretation and research — all this, further they endowed her with that which must promoted by the discovery of the art of ever excite the emulation and admiration printing, and hailed at the time by some of all really refined peoples. No careers thoughtful minds as an antidote to the more surely reflect the salient characterprevailing ambition, profligacy, and ava-istics and social standards of a race than rice, had its deeply injurious effect on those of the children of art. The painter what we should now call the public wel-is himself an nabjet de luxe. He germi

fare the remedy ultimately aggravating nates a divinely-dropt seed only the disease. Without the active principle where the soil has ripened into the reqof national and political life such studies uisite richness to bear him. He is a were entrancing and benumbing, like the superfluity which thrives only where there paradise of the lotus-eaters. Men occu- is the demand, no matter what its nature. pied with disputes and discussions, how-- superstition, variety, or taste for the ever polite and graceful, on the literature fruits of his pencil. He flourishes finally of a dead Past, were readily diverted from in courts and high places only where the questions of a living Present. Minds society has reached that culmination of a absorbed in the restoration of ancient real or seeming prosperity, when the letters, and in the fancied revival of a great and wealthy of the earth, sated Platonic philosophy, were least likely to with or secure of other pleasures, stretch miss the atmosphere of political liberty forth their hands to grasp those intelor of religious consistency. Palaces and lectual excitements to which genius alone gardens were used as places of debate on can minister. The painter, therefore, is, questions in which we now fail to see any in a certain sense, the sure thermometer practical utility. Accademie" were the of the atmosphere which he breathes; order of the day, and unproductive ped- but he lives, or can live, in an atmosantries were the consequence of such phere where higher things are stifled. Academies. A fictitious activity and real | For his inspiration is not injured by license in topics worthless to a State took causes which mortally affect the man of the place of all higher exercise of free-moral or patriotic aims. Certain condidom, and the literary erudition which tions there are which minister to his voraised more than one pontiff to the papal cation; and these conditions, viz., a glothrone has hardly bequeathed a thought rious climate, noble types in man and beneficial to the human race. Beaucoup nature, a sensuous worship, and a luxuride beaux ouvrages, et peu de belles actions ous society, no country ever possessed in illustraient l'Italie; et tandis qu'on trou- greater perfection than the Italy of the vait chez les érudits tant d'ardeur et de cinquecento. persévérance dans le travail, on trouvait peu de caractère chez les magistrats, peu

* Sismondi's Républiques Italiennes du Moyen Age, vol. v. p. 290.

From science, in the higher sense, the inaccurate and puerile, have sometimes Italian painter had no rivalry to fear. the value of a genuinely professional May it not be accepted as an axiom that criticism. the Church which utilizes art as an auxiliary to the extent employed by the papal hierarchy, will never tolerate the sterner sister? Such science as would help to destroy life, or animate an automaton, was readily welcomed, but he who ventured to assert that the earth revolved on her axis, and he who denounced the sale of indulgences, stood in the same condemned category at the court of Rome.

In all this there was the greater proof of the genius of the artist and of the triumph of art too healthy in her instincts and certain in her processes to be affected by conditions, however unsympathetic, tyrannical, and even prohibitory they would now be pronounced. Our modern standard, therefore, of the claims of the craft to peculiar exemptions and privileges suffers great change when we track the course of Italian art from its rise to its culmination. First, hailed as a new wonder which the vulgar and

It would, however, be a grave mistake to infer that Italian art in the person of her votaries received the same tribute of real respect and sympathy now paid to marvel-loving ran in crowds to see; then artists in our less gifted times a tribute employed and incorporated as a regular becoming perhaps both indiscriminate bandicraft in the service of the Church; and excessive, paid rather to the intel- next exalted or neglected, competed for lectual rank with which the great Italian or dismissed, petted or insulted, as the masters have endowed the idea of the whim, vanity, superstition, or intrigue, painter's vocation than to the real value full or empty exchequer, of pontiff or of the work. Partaking of the condition prince dictated; her own children, meanof a labourer in the service of the Church, while, partaking of all the complexion of the artist of the fifteenth century was, in the period—a race glorious and gifted, that capacity, equally controlled and dic- yet most of them what we now feel to be tated to. High-flown conceptions of the creatures of childish habits-with the deference paid to the painter, to his sen- passions of men and the follies of chilsitive nature and capricious inspiration, dren-fighting and quarrelling, maiming are soon overturned if we examine the and murdering, destroying their own estimates and contracts between himself works from pique, and their neighbours' and the chapters of churches and supe- from jealousy, art, for all that, is seen riors of convents, little differing in rigor- to hold on her course unfaltering; never ous matter-of-fact stipulations from those making a false step, never undoing what we nowadays conclude with carpenter or she had once done; till who shall say mason. Nor was an appeal to taste so what agencies could then have retarded much as an item in the bargain, for the her, and what would since have restored gratification of taste was neither the object her; whence she comes, and why she of the Church nor the requirement of the goes? faithful. Such "opinions of the press," Three great men in Italy stood highest too, as existed at the time were not cal- in the ranks of art at the highest time of culated to enlighten or encourage the her seeming greatness; closely connectman of acutely sensitive calibre. It ed in experience, widely separated in inwould be difficult to find writings more dividual character, each showing in vadull and pedantic and less cognizant of rious degrees the extraordinary gifts the real philosophy and true sphere of which, in some form, have never died art than those which were penned in out from the Italian race - all equally afpresence of the best glories of the cinque- fected by the manners and policy of the cento. No Italian work, indeed, has de- age; all "mighty men." These three scended to us of the slightest value to were Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angethe painter, as distinguished from the lo, and Raphael. To be a great artist mere historical student of art, excepting was by that time a passport both to emalways “Vasari's Lives," which, however ployment and to popularity. The world