just the same with our friend Botticelli. Scarce a dozen years
ago, it was almost an affectation to pretend you admired him. It is no
affectation now. Hundreds of assorted young women from the Abyss of
Bayswater may rise any morning here in sacred Florence and stand
genuinely enchanted before the Adoration of the Kings, or the Venus who
floats on her floating shell in a Botticellian ocean. And why? Because
Leighton, Holman Hunt, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Madox Brown, Strudwick,
have led them slowly up to it by golden steps innumerable. Thirty years
ago the art of the early Tuscan painters was something to us Northerners
exotic, strange, unconnected, archaeological. Gradually, it has been
brought nearer and nearer to us on the walls of the Grosvenor and the
New Gallery, till now he that runs may read; the ingenuous maiden,
fished from the Abyss of Bayswater, can drink in at a glance what it
took a Ruskin many years of his life and much slow development to attain
to piecemeal.

That is just what all great men are for--to make the world accept as a
truism in the generation after them what it rejected as a paradox in the
generation before them.

Not, of course, that there isn't a little of affectation, and still more
of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people,
incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are
anxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know," and
will straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an
admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two
aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, aesthetic
species, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi.
They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the
magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a
little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she
cried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless." And
straightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having been
misled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person of
the same name."

Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, by
explaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman's
full name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations are
impartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? The
first half is official, lik