eat painter not only quitted Rome in disgust,
but withdrew his services altogether from ungrateful Italy.

At Pavia Lionardo was presented to Francis I, of France, who, zealous
in patronizing art, engaged the painter to follow Francis's fortunes at
a salary of seven hundred crowns a year. Lionardo spent the remainder of
his life in France. His health had long been declining before he died,
aged sixty-seven years, at Cloux, near Amboise. He had risen high in the
favour of Francis. From this circumstance, and the generous, chivalrous
nature of the king, there doubtless arose the tradition that Francis
visited Lionardo on his death-bed; and that, while in the act of gently
assisting him to raise himself, the painter died in the king's arms.
Court chronicles do their best to demolish this story, by proving
Francis to have been at St Germain on the day when Lionardo died at
Cloux.

Lionardo was never married, and he left what worldly goods he possessed
to a favourite scholar. Besides his greater works, he filled many MS.
volumes, some with singularly accurate studies and sketches, maps, plans
for machines, scores for music (three volumes of these are in the Royal
Library at Windsor), and some with writing, which is written--probably
to serve as a sort of cipher--from right to left, instead of from left
to right. One of his writings is a valuable 'Treatise' on painting;
other writings are on scientific and philosophic subjects, and in these
Lionardo is believed to have anticipated some of the discoveries which
were reached by lines of close reasoning centuries later.

Lionardo's genius as a painter was expressed by his uniting, in the very
highest degree, truth and imagination. He was the shrewdest observer of
ordinary life, and he could also realize the higher mysteries and
profounder feelings of human nature. He drew exceedingly well. Of
transparent lights and shadows, or chiaroscuro, he was the greatest
master; but he was not a good colourist. His works are very rare, and
many which are attributed to him are the pictures of his scholars, for
he founded one of the great schools of Milan or Lombardy. There is a
tradition that he was, as Holbein was once believed to be, ambidextrous,
or capable of using his left hand as well as his right, and that he
painted with two brushes--one in each hand. Thus more than fully armed,
Lionardo da Vinci looms out on us like a Titan through the mists of
centuries, and he preaches to us the