life, and ready to give account of all that he has gathered from his observation of a world not ours.  In truth the world created by Correggio and interpreted by Toschi is very far removed from that of actual existence.  No painter has infused a more distinct individuality into his work, realising by imaginative force and powerful projection an order of beauty peculiar to himself, before which it is impossible to remain quite indifferent.  We must either admire the manner of Correggio, or else shrink from it with the distaste which sensual art is apt to stir in natures of a severe or simple type.

What, then, is the Correggiosity of Correggio?  In other words, what is the characteristic which, proceeding from the personality of the artist, is impressed on all his work?  The answer to this question, though by no means simple, may perhaps be won by a process of gradual analysis.  The first thing that strikes us in the art of Correggio is, that he has aimed at the realistic representation of pure unrealities.  His saints and angels are beings the like of whom we have hardly seen upon the earth.  Yet they are displayed before us with all the movement and the vivid truth of nature.  Next we feel that what constitutes the superhuman, visionary quality of these creatures, is their uniform beauty of a merely sensuous type.  They are all created for pleasure, not for thought or passion or activity or heroism.  The uses of their brains, their limbs, their every feature, end in enjoyment; innocent and radiant wantonness is the condition of their whole existence.  Correggio conceived the universe under the one mood of sensuous joy:  his world was bathed in luxurious light; its inhabitants were capable of little beyond a soft voluptuousness.  Over the domain of tragedy he had no sway, and very rarely did he attempt to enter on it:  nothing, for example, can be feebler than his endeavour to express anguish in the distorted features of Madonna, S. John, and the Magdalen, who are bending over the dead body of a Christ extended in the attitude of languid repose.  In like manner he could not deal with subjects which demand a pregnancy of intellectual meaning.  He paints the three Fates like young and joyous Bacchantes, places rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands instead of the distaff and the thread of human destinies, and they might figure appropriately upon the panels of a banquet-chamber in Pompeii.  In this respect Correggio might be termed the Rossini of painting.  The melodies of the ’Stabat Mater’—­Fac ut portem or Quis est homo—­are the exact analogues in music of Correggio’s voluptuous renderings of grave or mysterious motives.  Nor, again, did he possess that severe and lofty art of composition which subordinates the fancy to the reason, and which seeks for the highest intellectual beauty in a kind of architectural harmony supreme above the melodies of gracefulness in detail.  The Florentines and those who shared their spirit—­Michelangelo