“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 209

fountain due to any study of the far less pure examples accessible by the Pisan sculptors. The sound of its waters had been heard long before in the aisles of the Lombard; nor was it by Ghiberti, still less by Donatello, that the bed of that Jordan was dug deepest, but by Michael Angelo, the last heir of the Byzantine traditions descending through Orcagna, opening thenceforward through thickets darker and more dark, and with waves ever more soundless and slow, into the Dead Sea wherein its waters have been stayed.

40. It is time for us to pass to the subject which occupies the larger portion of the work-the History

“of Painting, as developed contemporaneously with her sister, Sculpture, and (like her) under the shadow of the Gothic Architecture, by Giotto and his successors throughout Italy, by Mino, Duccio, and their scholars at Siena, by Orcagna and Fra Angelico da Fiesole at Florence, and by the obscure but interesting primitive school of Bologna, during the fourteenth and the early years of the fifteenth century. The period is one, comparatively speaking, of repose and tranquillity,-the storm sleeps and the winds are still, the currents set in one direction, and we may sail from isle to isle over a sunny sea, dallying with the time, secure of a cloudless sky and of the greetings of innocence and love wheresoever the breeze may waft us. There is in truth a holy purity, an innocent naïveté, a child-like grace and simplicity, a freshness, a fearlessness, an utter freedom from affectation, a yearning after all things truthful, lovely and of good report, in the productions of this early time, which invest them with a charm peculiar in its kind, and which few even of the most perfect works of the maturer era can boast of,-and hence the risk and danger of becoming too passionately attached to them, of losing the power of discrimination, of admiring and imitating their defects as well as their beauties, of running into affectation in seeking after simplicity and into exaggeration in our efforts to be in earnest,-in a word, of forgetting that in art, as in human nature, it is the balance, harmony, and co-equal development of Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, which constitute perfection.”-Vol. ii. pp. 161-163.

41. To the thousand islands, or how many soever they may be, we shall allow ourselves to be wafted with all willingness, but not in Lord Lindsay’s three-masted vessel, with its balancing topmasts of Sense, Intellect, and Spirit. We are utterly tired of the triplicity; and we are mistaken if its application here be not as inconsistent as it is arbitrary. Turning back to the introduction, which we have quoted, the reader will find that while Architecture is there taken

XII. O

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