esuits to 'fanatics
laying stones upon a railway' or 'dynamiters blowing up an emperor or a
corner of Westminster Hall.' Such a judgment is harsh and crude in
expression and more suitable to the clamour of the Protestant Union than
to the dignity of the true historian. Mr. Symonds, however, is rarely
deliberately unfair, and there is no doubt but that his work on the
Catholic Reaction is a most valuable contribution to modern history--so
valuable, indeed, that in the account he gives of the Inquisition in
Venice it would be well worth his while to bring the picturesque fiction
of the text into some harmony with the plain facts of the footnote.

On the poetry of the sixteenth century Mr. Symonds has, of course, a
great deal to say, and on such subjects he always writes with ease,
grace, and delicacy of perception. We admit that we weary sometimes of
the continual application to literature of epithets appropriate to
plastic and pictorial art. The conception of the unity of the arts is
certainly of great value, but in the present condition of criticism it
seems to us that it would be more useful to emphasize the fact that each
art has its separate method of expression. The essay on Tasso, however,
is delightful reading, and the position the poet holds towards modern
music and modern sentiment is analysed with much subtlety. The essay on
Marino also is full of interest. We have often wondered whether those
who talk so glibly of Euphuism and Marinism in literature have ever read
either _Euphues_ or the _Adone_. To the latter they can have no better
guide than Mr. Symonds, whose description of the poem is most
fascinating. Marino, like many greater men, has suffered much from his
disciples, but he himself was a master of graceful fancy and of exquisite
felicity of phrase; not, of course, a great poet but certainly an artist
in poetry and one to whom language is indebted. Even those conceits that
Mr. Symonds feels bound to censure have something charming about them.
The continual use of periphrases is undoubtedly a grave fault in style,
yet who but a pedant would really quarrel with such periphrases as
_sirena de' boschi_ for the nightingale, or _il novello Edimione_ for
Galileo?

From the poets Mr. Symonds passes to the painters: not those great
artists of Florence and Venice of whom he has already written, but the
Eclectics of Bologna, the Naturalists of Naples and Rome. This chapter
is too polemical to be pleasa