ation, so far
from being satiated, is augmenting. Every scholar knows how largely
Milton was indebted to his poems for many of his most powerful images.
Byron inherited, though often at second hand, his mantle, in many of
his most moving conceptions. Schiller has embodied them in a noble
historic mirror; and the dreams of Goethe reveal the secret influence
of the terrible imagination which portrayed the deep remorse and
hopeless agonies of Malebolge.

MICHAEL ANGELO has exercised an influence on modern art little, if at
all, inferior to that produced on the realms of thought by Homer and
Dante. The father of Italian painting, the author of the frescoes on
the Sistine Chapel, he was, at the same time, the restorer of ancient
sculpture, and the intrepid architect who placed the Pantheon in the
air. Raphael confessed, that he owed to the contemplation of his works
his most elevated conceptions of their divine art. Sculpture, under
his original hand, started from the slumber of a thousand years, in
all the freshness of youthful vigour; architecture, in subsequent
times, has sought in vain to equal, and can never hope to surpass, his
immortal monument in the matchless dome of St Peters. He found
painting in its infancy--he left it arrived at absolute perfection. He
first demonstrated of what that noble art is capable. In the Last
Judgment he revealed its wonderful powers, exhibiting, as it were, at
one view, the whole circles of Dante's _Inferno_--portraying with
terrible fidelity the agonies of the wicked, when the last trumpet
shall tear the veil from their faces, and exhibit in undisguised truth
that most fearful of spectacles--_a naked human heart_. Casting aside,
perhaps with undue contempt, the adventitious aids derived from
finishing, colouring, and execution, he threw the whole force of his
genius into the design, the expression of the features, the drawing of
the figures. There never was such a delineator of bone and muscle as
Michael Angelo. His frescoes stand out in bold relief from the walls
of the Vatican, like the sculptures of Phidias from the pediment of
the Parthenon. He was the founder of the school of painting both at
Rome and Florence--that great school which, disdaining the
representation of still life, and all the subordinate appliances of
the art, devoted itself to the representation of the grand and the
beautiful; to the expression of passion in all its vehemence--of
emotion in all its intensity. His