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 of 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 hand 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 of religious impressions that he blended mere earthly
passions with a sort of religious sentimentalism, 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 economises all forces
for an opportunity of sudden and sure effect. The fame of Leonardo had
gone before him, and he was to model a colossal statue of Francesco, the
first Duke of Milan. As for Leonardo himself, he came not as an artist
at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a
strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious
likene