hom he had
entrusted such great undertakings. An indictment was brought against
the sculptor, charging him with appropriating to himself a portion of
the gold given him for the adornment of the statue of Athena; and
according to some authorities Pericles himself was included in the
charge. The gold had, however, been attached to the statue in such a
manner that it could be taken off and weighed, and in the proof, the
charge had to be abandoned. But Phidias did not escape so easily. He
was accused of sacrilege in having introduced portraits of himself and
Pericles on the shield of the goddess, where, says Plutarch, in the
bas-relief of the Battle of the Amazons, he carved his own portrait as
a bald old man lifting a stone with both hands, and also introduced an
excellent likeness of Pericles fighting with an Amazon.

Phidias died in prison before the trial came off, and his name must be
added to the long list of those whom an ungrateful world has rewarded
for their services with ignominy and death.

[Signature of the author.]

LEONARDO DA VINCI

By ANNA JAMESON

(1452-1519)

[Illustration: Leonardo Da Vinci.]

Leonardo da Vinci seems to present in his own person a _resume_ of all
the characteristics of the age in which he lived. He was _the_ miracle
of that age of miracles. Ardent and versatile as youth; patient and
persevering as age; a most profound and original thinker; the greatest
mathematician and most ingenious mechanic of his time; architect,
chemist, engineer, musician, poet, painter--we are not only astounded
by the variety of his natural gifts and acquired knowledge, but by the
practical direction of his amazing powers. The extracts which have
been published from MSS. now existing in his own handwriting show him
to have anticipated by the force of his own intellect some of the
greatest discoveries made since his time. "These fragments," says Mr.
Hallam, "are, according to our common estimate of the age in which he
lived, more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single
mind than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established
basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, Kepler, Castelli, and other
names illustrious; the system of Copernicus, the very theories of
recent geologists, are anticipated by Da Vinci within the compass of a
few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most
conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the
awe