mmate. What,
we think, as we gaze upward, would the Master have given for such a
craftsman? The hardness, coarseness, and animal crudity of the Roman
School are absent: so also is their vigour. But where the grace of
form and colour is so soft and sweet, where the high-bred calm of
good company is so sympathetically rendered, where the atmosphere of
amorous languor and of melody is so artistically diffused, we cannot
miss the powerful modelling and rather vulgar _tours de force_ of
Giulio Romano. The scale of tone is silvery golden. There are no hard
blues, no coarse red flesh-tints, no black shadows. Mellow lights,
the morning hues of primrose, or of palest amber, pervade the whole
society. It is a court of gentle and harmonious souls; and though
this style of beauty might cloy, at first sight there is something
ravishing in those yellow-haired white-limbed, blooming deities. No
movement of lascivious grace as in Correggio, no perturbation of
the senses as in some of the Venetians, disturbs the rhythm of their
music; nor is the pleasure of the flesh, though felt by the painter
and communicated to the spectator, an interruption to their divine
calm. The white, saffron-haired goddesses are grouped together
like stars seen in the topaz light of evening, like daffodils half
smothered in snowdrops, and among them, Diana, with the crescent
on her forehead, is the fairest. Her dream-like beauty need fear
no comparison with the Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo. Apollo and
Bacchus are scarcely less lovely in their bloom of earliest manhood;
honey-pale, as Greeks would say; like statues of living electron;
realising Simaetha's picture of her lover and his friend:

[Greek:

tois d' en xanthotera men elichrysoio geneias,
stethea de stilbonta poly pleon e tu Selana.[9]]

It was thus that the almost childlike spirit of the Milanese painters
felt the antique: how differently from their Roman brethren! It was
thus that they interpreted the lines of their own poets:--

E i tuoi capei piu volte ho somigliati
Di Cerere a le paglie secche o bionde
Dintorno crespi al tuo capo legati.[10]

Yet the painter of this hall--whether we are to call him Lanini or
another--was not a composer. Where he has not robbed the motives and
the distribution of the figures from Raphael, he has nothing left but
grace of detail. The intellectual feebleness of his style may be seen
in many figures of women playing upon instruments of music, range