determined by the greater or less comprehensiveness of the artist’s nature expressed in his work.  At the same time, the calibre of the artist’s genius must be estimated; for eminent greatness even of a narrow kind will always command our admiration:  and the amount of his originality has also to be taken into account.  What is unique has, for that reason alone, a claim on our consideration.  Judged in this way, Correggio deserves a place, say, in the sweet planet Venus, above the moon and above Mercury, among the artists who have not advanced beyond the contemplations which find their proper outcome in love.  Yet, even thus, he aids the culture of humanity.  ‘We should take care,’ said Goethe, apropos of Byron, to Eckermann, ’not to be always looking for culture in the decidedly pure and moral.  Everything that is great promotes cultivation as soon as we are aware of it.’

* * * * *

CANOSSA

Italy is less the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than of beauty, by divine right young eternally in spite of age.  This is due partly to her history and art and literature, partly to the temper of the races who have made her what she is, and partly to her natural advantages.  Her oldest architectural remains, the temples of Paestum and Girgenti, or the gates of Perugia and Volterra, are so adapted to Italian landscape and so graceful in their massive strength, that we forget the centuries which have passed over them.  We leap as by a single bound from the times of Roman greatness to the new birth of humanity in the fourteenth century, forgetting the many years during which Italy, like the rest of Europe, was buried in what our ancestors called Gothic barbarism.  The illumination cast upon the classic period by the literature of Rome and by the memory of her great men is so vivid, that we feel the days of the Republic and the Empire to be near us; while the Italian Renaissance is so truly a revival of that former splendour, a resumption of the music interrupted for a season, that it is extremely difficult to form any conception of the five long centuries which elapsed between the Lombard invasion in 568 and the accession of Hildebrand to the Pontificate in 1073.  So true is it that nothing lives and has reality for us but what is spiritual, intellectual, self-possessed in personality and consciousness.  When the Egyptian priest said to Solon, ‘You Greeks are always children,’ he intended a gentle sarcasm, but he implied a compliment; for the quality of imperishable youth belonged to the Hellenic spirit, and has become the heritage of every race which partook of it.  And this spirit in no common degree has been shared by the Italians of the earlier and the later classic epoch.  The land is full of monuments pertaining to those two brilliant periods; and whenever the voice of poet has spoken or the hand of artist has been at work, that spirit, as distinguished from the spirit of mediaevalism, has found expression.