position between faultful,
because insolent, ignorance, and virtuous, because gracious, knowledge,
so direct, and in so parallel elements, as in this instance. In general,
the analysis is much more complex. It is intensely difficult to indicate
the mischief of involuntary and modest ignorance, calamitous only in a
measure; fruitful in its lower field, yet sorrowfully condemned to that
lower field--not by sin, but fate.

When first I introduced you to Bewick, we closed our too partial
estimate of his entirely magnificent powers with one sorrowful
concession--he could draw a pig, but not a Venus.

Eminently he could so, because--which is still more sorrowfully to be
conceded--he liked the pig best. I have put now in your educational
series a whole galaxy of pigs by him; but, hunting all the fables
through, I find only one Venus, and I think you will all admit that she
is an unsatisfactory Venus.[AL] There is honest simplicity here; but you
regret it; you miss something that you find in Holbein, much more in
Botticelli. You see in a moment that this man knows nothing of Sphinxes,
or Muses, or Graces, or Aphrodites; and, besides, that, knowing nothing,
he would have no liking for them even if he saw them; but much prefers
the style of a well-to-do English housekeeper with corkscrew curls, and
a portly person.

155. You miss something, I said, in Bewick which you find in Holbein.
But do you suppose Holbein himself, or any other Northern painter, could
wholly quit himself of the like accusations? I told you, in the second
of these lectures, that the Northern temper, refined from savageness,
and the Southern, redeemed from decay, met, in Florence. Holbein and
Botticelli are the purest types of the two races. Holbein is a civilized
boor; Botticelli a reanimate Greek. Holbein was polished by
companionship with scholars and kings, but remains always a burgher of
Augsburg in essential nature. Bewick and he are alike in temper; only
the one is untaught, the other perfectly taught. But Botticelli _needs_
no teaching. He is, by his birth, scholar and gentleman to the heart's
core. Christianity itself can only inspire him, not refine him. He is as
tried gold chased by the jeweler,--the roughest part of him is the
outside.

Now how differently must the newly recovered scholastic learning tell
upon these two men. It is all out of Holbein's way; foreign to his
nature, useless at the best, probably cumbrous. But Botticelli receives
i