writing
"memoranda for the future editor of the History of Art," still seeking
the perfection of his great work. Arcangeli begged to see the medals once
more. As Winckelmann stooped down to take them from the chest, a cord was
thrown round his neck. Some time afterwards, a child whose friendship
Winckelmann had made to beguile the delay, knocked at the door, and
receiving no answer, gave an alarm. Winckelmann was found dangerously
wounded, and died a few hours later, after receiving the sacraments of
the Romish Church. It seemed as if the gods, in reward for his devotion
to them, had given him a death which, for its swiftness and its
opportunity, he might well have desired. "He has," says Goethe, "the
advantage of figuring in the memory of posterity, as one eternally able
and strong; for the image in which one leaves the world is that in which
one moves among the shadows." Yet, perhaps, it is not fanciful to regret
that the meeting with Goethe did not take place. Goethe, then in all the
pregnancy of his wonderful youth, still unruffled by the press and storm
of his earlier manhood, was awaiting Winckelmann with a curiosity of the
worthiest kind. As it was, Winckelmann became to him something like what
Virgil was to Dante. And Winckelmann, with his fiery friendships, had
reached that age and that period of culture at which emotions hitherto
fitful, sometimes concentrate themselves in a vital, unchangeable
relationship. German literary history seems to have lost the chance of
one of those famous friendships, the very tradition of which becomes a
stimulus to culture, and exercises an imperishable influence.

In one of the frescoes of the Vatican, Raffaelle has commemorated the
tradition of the Catholic religion. Against a strip of peaceful sky,
broken in upon by the beatific vision, are ranged the great personages
of. Christian history, with the Sacrament in the midst. Another fresco of
Raffaelle in the same apartment presents a very different company, Dante
alone appearing in both. Surrounded by the muses of Greek mythology,
under a thicket of myrtles, sits Apollo, with the sources of Castalia at
his feet. On either side are grouped those on whom the spirit of Apollo
descended, the classical and Renaissance poets, to whom the waters of
Castalia come down, a river making glad this other city of God. In this
fresco it is the classical tradition, the orthodoxy of taste, that
Raffaelle commemorates. Winckelmann's intellectual