ngs the beautiful youth in the crowd at Lystra,
who is as sharply contrasted with his surroundings as if he were a
denizen of another sphere. The ideal is again repeated in the St. John
of the Cecilia altar-piece, whose uplifted face has a sweetness which
is not so much feminine as celestial. The angel of Peter's deliverance
is less successful than the artist's other angel types. The head
seems too small for the splendidly vigorous body, and the face lacks
somewhat of strength.

If Raphael's favorite ideals were drawn from youth and womanhood, it
was not because he did not understand the purely masculine. The AEneas
of the Borgo fresco, the Paul of the Cecilia altar-piece, and the
Sixtus of the Sistine Madonna show, in three ages, what is best and
most distinctive in ideal manhood.

Raphael's type of beauty is not such as calls forth immediate or
extravagant admiration: it is satisfying rather than amazing, and its
qualities dawn slowly though steadily upon the imagination. Raphael
holds always to the golden mean; no exaggerated note jars upon the
perfection of his harmonies. For this reason his pictures never grow
tiresome. They stand the test of daily companionship and grow ever
lovelier through familiarity.

Without forcing the parallel, we may say that something of the same
spirit which animated the work of Raphael reappears in the familiar
poetry of Longfellow. The one artist had an eye for beautiful line,
the other had an ear for melodious verse, and both alike shunned
whatever was inharmonious, always seeking grace and symmetry. Their
subjects were, indeed, of dissimilar range. Raphael, impressed by the
scholarship of his time, chose themes which were larger and more
related to the experience of the world, while Longfellow was never
very far removed from the golden milestone of domestic life. Yet in
diverse subjects both turned instinctively to aspects of womanhood, to
what was refined and gently emotional, and turned away from the
violent and revolutionary.

II. ON BOOKS OF REFERENCE.

Within the last forty years the methods of criticism as applied to art
have undergone so many changes that there has been a rapid succession
of biographers and critics of Raphael until the student reader of
to-day scarcely knows whom to believe. The time was when Vasari, in
his important "Lives of the Painters," was the accepted source of
information, and all current writers borrowed unquestioningly from him
both facts an