that belief of which he seems never to have doubted, that nothing
which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose
its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside
which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once
been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which
they have ever been passionate, or expended time and zeal.

1871.


SANDRO BOTTICELLI

[50] IN Leonardo's treatise on painting only one contemporary is
mentioned by name--Sandro Botticelli. This pre-eminence may
be due to chance only, but to some will rather appear a result of
deliberate judgment; for people have begun to find out the charm
of Botticelli's work, and his name, little known in the last
century, is quietly becoming important. In the middle of the
fifteenth century he had already anticipated much of that
meditative subtlety, which is sometimes supposed peculiar to the
great imaginative workmen of its close. Leaving the simple
religion which had occupied the followers of Giotto for a century,
and the simple naturalism which had grown out of it, a thing of
birds and flowers only, he sought inspiration in what to him were
works of the modern world, the writings of Dante and Boccaccio,
and in new readings of his own of classical stories: or, if he
painted religious incidents, painted them with an under-current of
original sentiment, which touches you as the real matter of the
picture through the veil of its ostensible subject. What [51] is the
peculiar sensation, what is the peculiar quality of pleasure, which