rlier Italian painters which Mr Browning has done
something to stimulate.

I quote some thoughtful remarks on Botticelli by W.C. Lefroy in
_Macmillan's Magazine_: 'Mr Ruskin, we know, divides Italian art into
the art of faith, beginning with Giotto, and lasting rather more than
200 years, and the art of unbelief, or at least of cold and inoperative
faith, beginning in the middle of Raphael's life. But whatever division
we adopt, we must remember that the revival of Paganism, as a matter of
fact, affected men in different ways. Right across the schools this new
spirit draws its line, but the line is not a hard and sharp one. Some
men lie wholly on one side of it, with Giotto, Angelico, and Orcagna;
some wholly upon the other, with Titian and Correggio, but there are
some on whom it seems to fall as a rainbow falls upon a hill-side. Such,
for instance, is Botticelli. Now he tries to paint as men painted in the
old days of unpolluted faith, and then again he breaks away and paints
like a very heathen.

'The interest which this artist has excited in the present generation
has been exaggerated into something like a fashion, and recent criticism
has delighted to find or imagine in him the idiosyncrasies of recent
thought. To us it may be he does in truth say more than he or his
contemporaries dreamed of, but while true criticism will sternly refuse
to help us to see in his pictures that which is purely subjective, it
will, I think, recognise the fact that a day like ours is capable of
reading in the subtle suggestions of ancient art thoughts which have
only now come to be frankly defined or exquisitely analysed. To us,
moreover, Botticelli presents not only the poem of the apparition of the
young and beautiful manhood of humanism before the brooding and
entranced, yet half expectant, maidenhood of mediaevalism, but also the
poem of the painter's own peculiar relation to that crisis. For us there
is the poetry of the thing itself, and also the poetry of Botticelli's
attempt to express it. The work of Botticelli does not supply a
universal utterance for mankind like Shakespeare's plays, but when we
stand before the screen on which his "Nativity" is hung, or contemplate
in the adjoining room his two perplexed conceptions of "Aphrodite," we
are face to face with a genuine outcome of that memorable meeting,
mediaevalism, humanism, and Savonarola, which no generation can afford to
ignore, and our own especially delights to contemp