s in the corrupted
days of Roman society, when "corrumpere et corrumpi seculum vocatur." We
may conceive the enchantment with which the Romans, when the Capitol was
in all its splendour in the time of Augustus, read his charming
description of its shaggy precipices in the days of Evander.

"Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,
Aurea nunc, olim sylvestribus horrida dumis.
Jam tum religio pavidos terrebat agrestes
Dira loci; jam tum sylvam saxumque tremebant.
'Hoc nemus, hunc,' inquit, 'frondoso vertice collem,
Quis deus incertum est, habitat deus: Arcades ipsum
Credunt se vidisse Jovem, cum saepe nigrantem
AEgida concuteret dextra nimbosque cieret.'

* * * * *

Talibus inter se dictis, ad tecta subibant
Pauperis Evandri, passimque armenta videbant
Romanoque foro, et lautis mugire Carinis."--_AEneid_, viii. 347.

What Homer was to Virgil, and Ariosto to Tasso, that Michael Angelo was to
RAPHAEL. Though both these illustrious men lived in the same age, yet the
former was born nine years before the latter,[1] and he had attained to
eminence while his younger rival was yet toiling in the obscurity of
humble life. It was the sight of the magnificent frescoes of Michael
Angelo that first emancipated Raphael from the stiff and formal, though
beautiful style of his master, Pietro Perugino, and showed him of what his
noble art was susceptible. So great was the genius, so ardent the effort,
of the young aspirant, so rapid the progress of art in those days, when
the genius of modern Europe, locked up during the long frost of the middle
ages, burst forth with the vigour and beauty of a Canadian spring, that he
had brought painting, which he had taken up in a state of infancy in the
studio of Pietro Perugino, to absolute perfection when he died, at the age
of thirty-seven. Seventeen years, in Raphael's hands, sufficed to bring an
art as great and difficult as poetry to absolute perfection! Subsequent
ages, vainly as yet attempting to imitate, can never hope to surpass him.
How vast must have been the genius, how capacious the thought, how intense
the labour, of the man who could thus master and bring to perfection this
difficult art, in a period so short as, to men even of superior parts and
unwearied application, barely to gain the command of the pencil!

Modern painting, as it appears in the works of Michael Angelo, Raphael,
and Titian, is an art as elevated in kind as