To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial comprehension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave loftiness and fruitfulness.  The large eye of genius saw in the meanness of present objects their capabilities of treatment from their relations to some grand Past or Future.  How has Raphael—­we must still linger about the Vatican—­treated the humble craft of the ship-builder, in his “Building of the Ark?” It is in that scriptural series, to which we have referred, and which, judging from some fine rough old graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the Cartoons.  The dim of sight are the timid and the shrinking.  There is a cowardice in modern art.  As the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge’s friend made the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo collected no inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto; so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable of investiture with any grandeur.  The dock-yards at Woolwich would object derogatory associations.  The depot at Chatham would be the mote and the beam in its intellectual eye.  But not to the nautical preparations in the ship-yards of Civita Vecchia did Raphael look for instructions, when he imagined the Building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind.  In the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight the meanness of the operation.  There is the Patriarch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, giving directions.  And there are his agents—­the solitary but sufficient Three—­hewing, sawing, every one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus; under some instinctive rather than technical guidance; giant-muscled; every one a Hercules, or liker to those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns under Mongibello wrought in fire—­Brontes, and black Steropes, and Pyracmon.  So work the workmen that should repair a world!

Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with pictorial subjects.  In the latter, the exterior accidents are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing.  Othello’s colour—­the infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff—­do they haunt us perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character?  But in a picture Othello is always a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump Jack.  Deeply corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote—­the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse—­has never presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosinante.  That man has read his book by halves; he has laughed,