age have taken it up.  In the feverish and feeble melodrama of Alfred de Musset there is no touch of tragedy, hardly a shadow of passionate and piteous truth; in Mr. Browning’s noblest poem—­his noblest it seems to me—­the whole tragedy is distilled into the right words, the whole man raised up and reclothed with flesh.  One point only is but lightly touched upon—­missed it could not be by an eye so sharp and skilful—­the effect upon his art of the poisonous solvent of love.  How his life was corroded by it and his soul burnt into dead ashes, we are shown in full; but we are not shown in full what as a painter he was before, what as a painter he might have been without it.  This is what I think the works of his youth and age, seen near together as at Florence, make manifest to any loving and studious eye.  In those later works, the inevitable and fatal figure of the woman recurs with little diversity or change.  She has grown into his art, and made it even as herself; rich, monotonous in beauty, calm, complete, without heart or spirit.  But his has not been always “the low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand” it was then.  He had started on his way towards another goal than that.  Nothing now is left him to live for but his faultless hand and her faultless face—­still and full, suggestive of no change in the steady deep-lidded eyes and heavy lovely lips without love or pudency or pity.  Here among his sketches we find it again and ever the same, crowned and clothed only with the glory and the joy and the majesty of the flesh.  When the luxurious and subtle sense which serves the woman for a soul looks forth and speaks plainest from those eyes and lips, she is sovereign and stately still; there is in her beauty nothing common or unclean.  We cannot but see her for what she is; but her majestic face makes no appeal for homage or forgiveness.

    Essays and Studies (London, 1875).

[Illustration:  THE DANCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF HERODIAS.
        Andrea del Sarto.]

ADORATION OF THE MAGI

(GENTILE DA FABRIANO)

F.A.  GRUYER

At the beginning of the Fifteenth Century, Gentile da Fabriano[4] painted an Adoration of the Magi,[5] in which the faithful representation of contemporary scenes is again found.  The Virgin, completely enveloped in a large blue cloak, is seated in front of the stable, with her head piously inclined towards her Son whom she is regarding with tender gaze.  St. Joseph is at her side and behind her are two young women who are holding and admiring the gifts offered to the Saviour.  The infant Jesus has laid his hand on the head of the oldest of the Magi, who, prostrated, kisses his feet with devotion.  The two other Kings are much younger than the first one.  They are presenting their offerings to the Son of God, and are about to lay their crowns before him.