great hall of the Electoral Palace at Leipsic; or any theatrical excitement such as was produced on cultivated intellects when Garrick and Siddons represented the sublime conceptions of the myriad-minded Shakspeare.  These glories may reappear, but never will they shine as they did before.  No more Olympian games, no more Roman triumphs, no more Dodona oracles, no more Flavian amphitheatres, no more Mediaeval cathedrals, no more councils of Nice or Trent, no more spectacles of kings holding the stirrups of popes, no more Fields of the Cloth of Gold, no more reigns of court mistresses in such palaces as Versailles and Fontainbleau,—­ah!  I wish I could add, no more such battlefields as Marengo and Waterloo,—­only copies and imitations of these, and without the older charm.  The world is moving on and perpetually changing, nor can we tell what new vanity will next arise,—­vanity or glory, according to our varying notions of the dignity and destiny of man.  We may predict that it will not be any mechanical improvement, for ere long the limit will be reached,—­and it will be reached when the great mass cannot find work to do, for the everlasting destiny of man is toil and labor.  But it will be some sublime wonders of which we cannot now conceive, and which in time will pass away for other wonders and novelties, until the great circle is completed; and all human experiments shall verify the moral wisdom of the eternal revelation.  Then all that man has done, all that man can do, in his own boastful thought, will be seen, in the light of the celestial verities, to be indeed a vanity and a failure, not of human ingenuity and power, but to realize the happiness which is only promised as the result of supernatural, not mortal, strength, yet which the soul in its restless aspirations never ceases its efforts to secure,—­everlasting Babel-building to reach the unattainable on earth.

Now the revival of art in Italy was one of the great movements in the series of human development.  It peculiarly characterized the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  It was an age of artistic wonders, of great creations.

Italy, especially, was glorious when Michael Angelo was born, 1474; when the rest of Europe was comparatively rude, and when no great works in art, in poetry, in history, or philosophy had yet appeared.  He was descended from an illustrious family, and was destined to one of the learned professions; but he could not give up his mind to anything but drawing,—­as annoying to his father as Galileo’s experiments were to his parent; as unmeaning to him as Gibbon’s History was to George III.,—­“Scribble, scribble, scribble; Mr. Gibbon, I perceive, sir, you are always a-scribbling.”  No perception of a new power, no sympathy with the abandonment to a specialty not indorsed by fashions and traditions, but without which abandonment genius cannot easily be developed.  At last the father yielded, and the son was apprenticed to a painter,—­a degradation in the eyes of Mediaeval aristocracy.