in antique plastic art.  Michelangelo’s Cupid is therefore as original as his Bacchus.  Much as critics have written, and with justice, upon the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance, they have failed to point out that the Paganism of the Cinque Cento rarely involved a servile imitation of the antique or a sympathetic intelligence of its spirit.  Least of all do we find either of these qualities in Michelangelo.  He drew inspiration from his own soul, and he went straight to Nature for the means of expressing the conception he had formed.  Unlike the Greeks, he invariably preferred the particular to the universal, the critical moment of an action to suggestions of the possibilities of action.  He carved an individual being, not an abstraction or a generalisation of personality.  The Cupid supplies us with a splendid illustration of this criticism.  Being a product of his early energy, before he had formed a certain manneristic way of seeing Nature and of reproducing what he saw, it not only casts light upon the spontaneous working of his genius, but it also shows how the young artist had already come to regard the inmost passion of the soul.  When quite an old man, rhyming those rough platonic sonnets, he always spoke of love as masterful and awful.  For his austere and melancholy nature, Eros was no tender or light-winged youngling, but a masculine tyrant, the tamer of male spirits.  Therefore this Cupid, adorable in the power and beauty of his vigorous manhood, may well remain for us the myth or symbol of love as Michelangelo imagined that emotion.  In composition, the figure is from all points of view admirable, presenting a series of nobly varied line-harmonies.  All we have to regret is that time, exposure to weather, and vulgar outrage should have spoiled the surface of the marble.

VI

It is natural to turn from the Cupid to another work belonging to the English nation, which has recently been ascribed to Michelangelo.  I mean the Madonna, with Christ, S. John, and four attendant male figures, once in the possession of Mr. H. Labouchere, and now in the National Gallery.  We have no authentic tradition regarding this tempera painting, which in my judgment is the most beautiful of the easel pictures attributed to Michelangelo.  Internal evidence from style renders its genuineness in the highest degree probable.  No one else upon the close of the fifteenth century was capable of producing a composition at once so complicated, so harmonious, and so clear as the group formed by Madonna, Christ leaning on her knee to point a finger at the book she holds, and the young S. John turned round to combine these figures with the exquisitely blended youths behind him.  Unfortunately the two angels or genii upon the left hand are unfinished; but had the picture been completed, we should probably have been able to point out another magnificent episode in the composition, determined by the transverse line carried from the