a part of the whole, it becomes a necessary
thing to consider them with the beauties to which they may be
conjoined; nor must we be deterred in our search for the latter quality
by such occasional drawbacks, if we would investigate the efforts of the
artist-mind toward excellence, for that was its characteristic feature
from the fall of Rome to the period in which Duerer flourished. In the
somewhat gaudy glories of the Byzantine school, we can trace only the
failing powers of a great empire conscious of its old dignity but not
fully able to display it. In the barbaric night which succeeded, we find
art sunk to the most childish attempt at imitating simple nature; which
was "copied most vilely." In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we
trace the latent wish for the delineation of beauty struggling again
into life; but it was simply the wish rather than the power to delineate
the graceful, that we find displayed in the contorted figures which the
artists of these days attempted to picture as graceful beings. Still,
crude and strange, or even grotesque, as they may appear, they are not
to be despised. Amid much that is repulsive to modern cultivated taste,
we occasionally find _naive_ delineations of simple beauty, natural
expression, and touches of human pathos, which tell how honestly and how
eagerly these old artists worked; how truly they wished to do more than
they had power to accomplish; and though clogged to the earth by the
dark age they lived in, how earnestly they wished to soar above that
position. The archaisms of old Greece are not better than such works;
and as we can trace the onward course of those ancient masters of art
from the rude outlines on the vases of Etruria, to the glorious works of
Phidias and Praxiteles--even so, if we wish to know the true course of
the revival of modern art, must we trace it in the sculpture,
wall-painting, and missal-drawing, of the middle ages, until we find it
assume a more definite and better-regulated style in the fifteenth
century; that period of the revival of classical tastes, and bright
day-spring of art in Italy, from which we ourselves still drink
inspiration as from the "well undefiled."

The influence of the Italian school after the era of Raffaelle may be
said to be paramount. As his works became known and studied, they gave
laws to other artists; and the mannerisms and peculiarities of earlier
schools were softened down and disappeared. Gothic art--if such