ered treatise on painting which a Frenchman, Raffaelle du
Fresne, a hundred years afterwards, compiled from Leonardo's bewildered
manuscripts, written strangely as his manner was, from right to left,
have imagined a rigid order in his inquiries. But this rigid order was
little in accordance with the restlessness of his character; and if we
think of him as the mere reasoner who subjects design to anatomy, and
composition to mathematical rules, we shall hardly have of him that
impression which those about him received from him. Poring over his
crucibles, making experiments with colour, trying by a strange variation
of the alchemist's dream to discover the secret, not of an elixir to
make man's natural life immortal, but rather giving immortality to the
subtlest and most delicate effects of painting, he seemed to them rather
the sorcerer or the magician, possessed of curious secrets and a hidden
knowledge, living in a world of which he alone possessed the key. What
his philosophy seems to have been most like is that of Paracelsus or
Cardan; and much of the spirit of the older alchemy still hangs about
it, with its confidence in short cuts and odd byways to knowledge. To
him philosophy was to be something giving strange swiftness and double
sight, divining the sources of springs beneath the earth or of
expression beneath the human countenance, clairvoyant of occult gifts in
common or uncommon things, in the reed at the brook-side or the star
which draws near to us but once in a century. How in this way the clear
purpose was overclouded, the fine chaser's head perplexed, we but dimly
see; the mystery which at no point quite lifts from Leonardo's life is
deepest here. But it is certain that at one period of his life he had
almost ceased to be an artist.

The year 1483--the year of the birth of Raffaelle and the thirty-first
of Leonardo's life--is fixed as the date of his visit to Milan by the
letter in which he recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to
tell him for a price strange secrets in the art of war. It was that
Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so
susceptible to religious impressions that he turned his worst passions
into a kind of religious cultus, and who took for his device the
mulberry tree--symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers
and fruit together, of a wisdom which economizes all forces for an
opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had g