gs;--Mr. Ruskin sees in it only a "dim, stupid, serene,
leguminous enjoyment." But whoever knows Rome will at least recognize in
Claude's pictures some reflex of that enchantment that still hangs over
the wondrous city, and draws to it generation after generation of
pilgrims. In what does the mysterious charm consist? Is it not that the
place seems set apart from the working-day world of selfish and warring
interests? that here all manner of men, for once, lay aside their sordid
occupations and their vulgar standards, to come together on the ground
of a common humanity? It is easy to sneer at the Renaissance, but to
understand it we must take it in its connection. The matters that
interested that age seem now superfluous, the recreations of a holiday
rather than the business of life. But coming from the dust and din of
the fifteenth century, it looks differently. It was, in whatever dim or
fantastic shape, a recognition of universal brotherhood,--of a common
ground whereon all mankind could meet in peace and even sympathy, were
it only for a picnic. In this _villeggiatura_ of the human race the
immediate aim is no very lofty one,--not truth, not duty, but to please
or be pleased. But who is it that is to be pleased? Not the great of the
earth, not the consecrated of the Church, not the men merely of this
guild or this nation, but Man. It is the festival of the new saint,
Humanus,--a joyful announcement that the ancient antagonism is not
fundamental, but destined to be overcome.

This dreamy, half-sad, but friendly and soothing influence, that
breathes from Claude's landscapes, is not the highest that Nature can
inspire, but it is far better than to see in the earth only food,
lodging, and a place to fight in, or even mere background and
filling-in.

The builders of the Rhine-castles looked down the reaches of the river
only to spy out their prey or their enemy; the monks in their quiet
valleys looked out for their trout-stream and kitchen-garden, but any
interest beyond that would have been heathenish and dangerous. Whilst to
the ancients the earth had value only as enjoyable, inhabitable, the
earlier Christian ages valued it only as uninhabitable, as a wilderness
repelling society. In the earliest mediaeval landscapes, the effort to
represent a wilderness that is there only for the sake of the hermits
leads to the curious contradiction of a populous hermitage, every part
of it occupied by figures resolutely bent on be