ntact of select intelligences of diverse
vocation has resulted the choicest wit and the most genial
companionship. If from special we turn to general associations, from
biography to history, the same prolific affinities are evident, whereby
the artist becomes an interpreter of life, and casts the halo of
romance over the stern features of reality. Hampton Court is the almost
breathing society of Charles the Second's reign; the Bodleian Gallery is
vivid with Britain's past intellectual life; the history of France is
pictured on the walls of Versailles; the luxury of color bred by the
sunsets of the Euganean hills, the waters of the Adriatic, the marbles
of San Marco, and the skies and atmosphere of Venice, are radiant on
the canvas of Titian, Tintoretto, and Paul Veronese; Michel Angelo has
embodied the soul of his era and the loftiest spirit of his country;
Salvator typified the half-savage picturesqueness, Neapolitan Claude the
atmospheric enchantments, Carlo Dolce the effeminate grace, Titian the
voluptuous energy, Guido the placid self-possession, and Raphael and
Correggio the religious sentiment of Italy; Watteau put on canvas the
_fete champetre_; the peasant-life of Spain is pictured by Murillo,
her asceticism by the old religious limners; what English rustics were
before steam and railroads Gainsborough and Moreland reveal, Wilkie has
permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and domesticity, and Lawrence
framed and fixed the elegant shapes of a London drawing-room; and each
of these is a normal type and suggestive exemplar to the imagination,
a chapter of romance, a sequestration and initial token of the
characteristic and the historical, either of what has become traditional
or what is forever true.

The indirect service good artists have rendered by educating observation
has yet to be acknowledged. The Venetian painters cannot be even
superficially regarded, without developing the sense of color; nor the
Roman, without enlarging our cognizance of expression; nor the English,
without refining our perception of the evanescent effects in scenery.
Raphael has made infantile grace obvious to unmaternal eyes; Turner
opened to many a preoccupied vision the wonders of atmosphere; Constable
guided our perception of the casual phenomena of wind; Landseer, that
of the natural language of the brute creation; Lely, of the coiffure;
Michel Angelo, of physical grandeur; Rolfe, of fish; Gerard Dow, of
water; Cuyp, of meadows;