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hope of victory animates me. Your spirit, your age, your valor, give me confidence, to say nothing of necessity, which makes even cowards brave. To prevent the numbers of the enemy from surrounding us our confined situation is sufficient; but should Fortune be unjust to your valor, take care not to lose your lives unavenged-take care not to be taken and butchered like cattle rather than, fighting like men, to leave to your enemies a bloody and mournful victory.

AFTER THE BATTLE.*

When the battle was over, it was plainly seen what boldness and what energy of spirit had prevailed throughout the army of Catiline, for, almost everywhere, every soldier, after yielding up his breath, covered with his corpse the spot which he had occupied when alive. A few, indeed, whom the prætorian cohort had dispersed, had fallen somewhat differently, but all with wounds in front. Catiline himself was found far in advance of his men, among the dead bodies of the enemy; he was not quite breathless and still expressed in his countenance the fierceness of spirit which he had shown during his life. Of his whole army, neither in the battle nor in flight was any free-born citizen made prisoner, for they had spared their own lives no more than those of the enemy. did the army of the Roman people obtain a joyful or bloodless victory, for all their bravest men were either killed in the battle or left the field severely wounded.

Nor

Of many who went from the camp to view the ground or plunder the slain, some, in turning over the bodies of the enemy, discovered * Catiline and Caius Antonius, Petreius commanding the

latter.

a friend, others an acquaintance, others a relative; some, too, recognized their enemies. Thus gladness and sorrow, grief and joy, were variously felt throughout the whole army.

Translation of REV. JOHN SELBY WATSON, M. A.

IAG

THE SPIRIT OF WINE.

FROM "OTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE."

AGO. What, are you hurt, lieutenant?
CASSIO. Ay, past all surgery.
IAGO. Marry, Heaven forbid !

CAS. Reputation, reputation, reputation ! Ch, I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part, sir, of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation! Drunk? and speak parrot? and squabble? swagger? swear? and discourse fustian with one's own shadow? O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil. I remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly; a quarrel, but nothing wherefore.

Oh that men should

put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, revel, pleasure and applause transform ourselves into beasts!

IAGO. Come, you are too severe a moraler. . . .

CAS. I will ask him for my place again : he shall tell me I am a drunkard. Had I as many mouths as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! Oh, strange! Every inordinate cup is unblessed and the ingredient is a devil.

SHAKESPEARE.

GIOTTO.

AMBROGIOTTO BONDONE; BORN 1276; DIED 1336.

"Cimabue thought

To lord it over painting's field, and now

The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed."-Carey's Dante.

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FTEN quoted as have been these lines, from Dante's Purgatorio, they must needs be once more quoted here, for it is a curious circumstance that, applicable in his own day, five hundred years ago, they should still be so applicable in ours. Open any common history not intended for the very profound, and there we still find Cimabue "lording it over painting's field" and placed at the head of a revolution in art with which, as an artist, he had little or nothing to do, but much as a man; for to him to his quick perception and generous protection of talent in the lowly shepherdboy-we owe Giotto, than whom no single human being of whom we read has exercised in any particular department of science or art a more immediate, wide and lasting influence. The total change in the direction and character of art must in all human probability have taken place sooner or later, since all the influences of that wonderful period of regeneration were tending toward it. Then did architecture struggle, as it were, from the Byzantine into the Gothic forms like a mighty plant putting forth its rich foliage and shooting up toward heaven; then did the speech of the people the vulgar tongues, as they were called-begin to assume their present struc

ture and become the medium through which beauty and love and action and feeling and thought were to be uttered and immortalized; and then arose Giotto, the destined instrument through which his own beautiful art was to become, not a mere fashioner of idols, but one of the great interpreters of the human soul, with all its "infinite" of feelings and faculties, and of human life in all its multifarious aspects. Giotto was the first painter who "held, as it were, the mirror up to Nature." Cimabue's strongest claim to the gratitude of succeeding ages is that he bequeathed such a man to his native country and to the world.

About the year 1289, when Cimabue was already old and at the height of his fame, as he was riding in the valley of Vespignano, about fourteen miles from Florence, his attention was attracted by a boy who was herding sheep, and who, while his flocks were feeding around, seemed intently drawing on a smooth fragment of slate, with a bit of pointed stone, the figure of one of his sheep as it was quietly grazing before him. Cimabue rode up to him, and, looking with astonishment at the performance of the untutored boy, asked him if he would go with him and learn, to which the boy replied that he was right willing if his father were content. The father, a herdsman of the valley-by name Bondone-being consulted, gladly consented to the wish of the noble stranger, and Giotto hence

This pretty story, which was first related by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the sculptor (born 1378), and since by Vasari and a thousand others, luckily rests on evidence as satisfactory as can be given for any events of a rude and

forth became the inmate and pupil of Cim- various attempts had been made at differabue. ent times without success, till at length, as late as 1840, they were brought to light. by the perseverance and enthusiasm of Mr. Bezzi, an Italian gentleman. On comparing the head of Dante painted when he was about thirty, prosperous and distinguished in his native city, with the later portraits of him when an exile, worn, wasted, embittered by misfortune and disappointment and wounded pride, the difference of expression is as touching as the identity in feature is indubitable.

distant age, and may well obtain our belief, as well as gratify our fancy; it has been the subject of many pictures, and is introduced in Rogers's Italy:

"

Let us wander thro' the fields Where Cimabue found the shepherd-boy Tracing his idle fancies on the ground." Giotto was about twelve or fourteen years old when taken into the house of Cimabue. For his instruction in those branches of polite learning necessary to an artist his protector placed him under the tuition of Brunetto Latini, who was also the preceptor of Dante. When, at the age of twenty-six, Giotto lost his friend and master, he was already an accomplished man as well as a celebrated painter, and the influence of his large, original mind upon the later works of Cimabue is distinctly to be traced.

The first recorded performance of Giotto was a painting on the wall of the Palazzo dell' Podestà, or council-chamber, of Florence, in which were introduced the portraits of Dante, Brunetto Latini, Corso Donati, and others. Vasari speaks of these works as the first successful attempts at portraiture in the history of modern art. They were soon afterward plastered or whitewashed over during the triumph of the enemies of Dante, and for ages, though known to exist, they were lost and buried from sight. The hope of recovering these most interesting portraits had long been entertained, and

The attention which in his childhood Giotto seems to have given to all natural forms and appearances showed itself in his earlier pictures; he was the first to whom it occurred to group his personages into something like a situation and to give to their attitudes and features the expression adapted to it. Thus, in a very early picture of the Annunciation, he gave to the Virgin a look of fear; and in another, painted some time afterward, of the presentation in the temple, he made the infant Christ shrink from the priest, and, turning, extend his little arms to his mother, the first attempt at that species of grace and naïveté of expression afterward carried to perfection by Raffaelle. These and other works painted in his native city so astonished his fellow-citizens and all who beheld them by their beauty and novelty that they seem to have wanted adequate words in which to express the excess of their delight and admiration, and insisted that the figures of Giotto so completely beguiled the sense that they were mistaken for realities-a commonplace culogium never merited but by the most commonplace and mechanical of painters.

In the church of Santa Croce, Giotto painted a coronation of the Virgin, still to be seen, with choirs of angels on either side. In the refectory he painted the Last Supper, also still remaining—a grand, solemn, simple composition, which, as a first endeavor to give variety of expression and attitude to a number of persons-all seated, and all but two actuated by a similar feeling -must still be regarded as extraordinary. In a chapel of the church of the Carmine at Florence he painted a series of pictures from the life of John the Baptist. These were destroyed by fire in 1771, but, happily, an English engraver then studying at Florence, named Patch, had previously made accurate drawings from them, which he engraved and published.

The pope, Boniface VIII., hearing of his marvellous skill, invited him to Rome, and the story says that the messenger of His Holiness, wishing to have some proof that Giotto was indeed the man he was in search of, desired to see a specimen of his excellence in his art. Hereupon, Giotto taking up a sheet of paper, traced on it with a single flourish of his hand a circle so perfect that "it was a miracle to see," and, though we know not how or why, seems to have at once converted the pope to a belief of his superiority over all other painters. This story gave rise to the well-known Italian proverb, "Rounder than the O of Giotto," and is something like a story told of one of the Grecian painters. But to return. Giotto went to Rome and there executed many things which raised his fame higher and higher, and among them, for the ancient basilica of St. Peter's, the famous mosaic of the Navicella -or the Barca, as it is sometimes called.

It represents a ship with the disciples on a tempestuous sea; the winds, personified as demons, rage around it.

By the time Giotto had attained his thirtieth year he had reached such hitherto unknown excellence in art, and his celebrity was so universal, that every city and every petty sovereign in Italy contended for the honor of his presence and his pencil and tempted him with the promise of rich rewards. For the lords of Arezzo, of Rimini and Ravenna, and for the duke of Milan, he executed many works now almost wholly perished. Castruccio Castricani, the warlike tyrant of Lucca, also employed him, but how Giotto was induced to listen to the offers of this enemy of his country is not explained. Perhaps Castruccio, as the head of the Ghibelline party, in which Giotto had apparently enrolled himself, appeared in the light of a friend rather than an enemy; however this may be, a picture which Giotto painted for Castruccio, and in which he introduced the portrait of the tyrant with a falcon on his fist, is still preserved in the lyceum at Lucca. For Guido da Polente, the father of that hapless Francesca di Rimini whose story is so beautifully told by Dante, he painted the interior of a church, and for Malatesta di Rimini (who was father of Francesca's husband) he painted the portrait of that prince in a bark with his companions and a company of mariners, and among them, Vasari tells us, was the figure of a sailor who, turning round with his hand before his face, is in the act of spitting in the sea, so lifelike as to strike the beholders with amazement. This has perished, but the figure of the thirsty man stooping to drink in one of the frescoes at Assisi still remains

to show the kind of excellence through which Giotto excited such admiration in his contemporaries-a power of imitation, a truth in the expression of natural actions and feelings, to which painting had never yet ascended or descended. This leaning to the actual and the real has been made a subject of reproach.

It is said-but this does not rest on very satisfactory evidence that Giotto also visited Avignon in the train of Pope Clement V., and painted there the portraits of Petrarch and Laura.

About the year 1327, King Robert of Naples, the father of Queen Joanna, wrote to his son, the duke of Calabria, then at Florence, to send to him on any terms the famous painter Giotto, who accordingly travelled to the court of Naples, stopping on his way in several cities, where he left specimens of his skill. He also visited Orvieto for the purpose of viewing the sculpture with which the brothers Agostino and Agnolo were decorating the cathedral, and not only bestowed on it high commendation, but obtained for the artists the praise and patronage they merited. There is at Gaeta a crucifixion, painted by Giotto, either on his way to Naples to Naples or on his return, in which he introduced himself kneeling in an attitude of deep devotion and contrition at the foot of the cross. This introduction of portraiture into a subject so awful was another innovation, not so praiseworthy as some of his alterations. Giotto's feeling for truth and propriety of expression is particularly remarkable and commendable in the alteration of the dreadful but popular subject of the crucifix; in the Byzantine school the sole aim seems to have been to represent physical agony, and to render it by every

species of distortion and exaggeration as terrible and repulsive as possible. Giotto was the first to soften this awful and painful figure by an expression of divine resignation and by greater attention to beauty of form. A Crucifixion painted by him became the model for his scholars and was multiplied by imitation through all Italy; so that a famous painter of crucifixes after the Greek fashion, Margaritone, who had been a friend and contemporary of Cimabue, confounded by the introduction of this new method of art, which he partly disdained and partly despaired to imitate, and old enough to hate innovations of all kinds, took to his bed infastidito ("through vexation"), and so died.

But to return to Giotto, whom we left on the road to Naples. King Robert received him with great honor and rejoicing, and, being a monarch of singular accomplishments and fond of the society of learned and distinguished men, he soon found that Giotto was not merely a painter, but a man of the world, a man of various acquirements, whose general reputation for wit and vivacity was not unmerited. He would sometimes visit the painter at his work, and while watching the rapid progress of his pencil amused himself with the quaint good sense of his discourse.

"If I were you, Giotto," said the king to him one very hot day, "I would leave off work and rest myself."

"And so would I, sire," replied the painter, "if I were you."

The king, in a playful mood, desired him to paint his kingdom, on which Giotto immediately sketched the figure of an ass with a heavy packsaddle on his back smelling with

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