Christian. Kosmon, your thoughts seduce you; or rather, your nature prefers the full and rich to the exact and simple:  you do not go deep enough—­do not penetrate beneath the image’s gilt overlay, and see that it covers only worm-devoured wood.  Your very comparison tells against you.  What you call ripeness, others, with as much truth, may call over-ripeness, nay, even rottenness; when all the juices are drunk with their lusciousness, sick with over-sweetness.  And the art which you call youthful and immature—­may be, most likely is, mature and wholesome in the same degree that it is tasteful, a perfect round of beautiful, pure, and good.  You call youth immature; but in what does it come short of manhood.  Has it not all that man can have,—­free, happy, noble, and spiritual thoughts?  And are not those thoughts newer, purer, and more unselfish in the youth than in the man?  What eye has the man, that the youth’s is not as comprehensive, keen, rapid, and penetrating? or what hand, that the youth’s is not as swift, forceful, cunning, and true?  And what does the youth gain in becoming man?  Is it freshness, or deepness, or power, or wisdom? nay rather—­is it not languor—­the languor of satiety—­of indifferentism?  And thus soul-rusted and earth-charmed, what mate is he for his former youth?  Drunken with the world-lees, what can he do but pourtray nature drunken as well, and consumed with the same fever or stupor that consumes himself, making up with gilding and filigree what he lacks in truth and sincerity? and what comparison shall exist here and between what his youth might or could have done, with a soul innocent and untroubled as heaven’s deep calm of blue, gazing on earth with seraph eyes—­looking, but not longing—­or, in the spirit rapt away before the emerald-like rainbow-crowned throne, witnessing “things that shall be hereafter,” and drawing them down almost as stainless as he beheld them?  What an array of deep, earnest, and noble thinkers, like angels armed with a brightness that withers, stand between Giotto and Raffaelle; to mention only Orcagna, Ghiberti, Masaccio, Lippi, Fra Beato Angelico, and Francia.  Parallel them with post-Raffaelle artists?  If you think you can, you have dared a labour of which the fruit shall be to you as Dead Sea apples, golden and sweet to the eye, but, in the mouth, ashes and bitterness.  And the Phidian era was a youthful one—­the highest and purest period of Hellenic art:  after that time they added no more gods or heroes, but took for models instead—­the Alcibiadeses and Phyrnes, and made Bacchuses and Aphrodites; not as Phidias would have—­clothed with the greatness of thought, or girded with valour, or veiled with modesty; but dissolved with the voluptuousness of the bath, naked, wanton, and shameless.