d perhaps
its chief enjoyment in the attitude of the scholar, in the enthusiastic
acquisition of knowledge for its own sake:--if we thus view Raphael and
his works in their environment we shall find even his seemingly
mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his own patient
disposal of the means at hand. Facile master as he may seem, as indeed
he is, he is also one of the world's typical scholars, with [39] Plato,
and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The formula of his genius, if we
must have one, is this: genius by accumulation; the transformation of
meek scholarship into genius--triumphant power of genius.

Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was born in 1483, year
also of the birth of Luther, leader of the other great movement of that
age, the Reformation--Urbino, under its dukes of the house of
Montefeltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of native artistic
faculty from the first a willing learner. The gloomy old fortress of
the feudal masters of the town had been replaced, in those later years
of the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of Quattro-cento taste,
a museum of ancient and modern art, the owners of which lived there,
gallantly at home, amid the choicer flowers of living humanity. The
ducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less than a school of
ambitious youth in all the accomplishments alike of war and peace.
Raphael's connexion with it seems to have become intimate, and from the
first its influence must have overflowed so small a place. In the case
of the lucky Raphael, for once, the actual conditions of early life had
been suitable, propitious, accordant to what one's imagination would
have required for the childhood of the man. He was born amid the art
he was, not to transform, but to perfect, by a thousand reverential
retouchings. In no palace, however, but [40] in a modest abode, still
shown, containing the workshop of his father, Giovanni Santi. But
here, too, though in frugal form, art, the arts, were present. A store
of artistic objects was, or had recently been, made there, and now
especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures in the old Umbrian
manner. In quiet nooks of the Apennines Giovanni's works remain; and
there is one of them, worth study, in spite of what critics say of its
crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its immaturity, at least,
though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins
you nevertheless to return a