joy of life everywhere to be found in it. Well, with this shy and
refined mind Italy is able to accomplish her mission; she humanises him,
gives him the Latin sensibility and clarity of mind, the Latin
refinement too, so that we are ready to forget he was Rubens'
country-man, and think of him often enough as an Englishman, endowed as
he was with much of the delicate and lovely genius of so many of our
artists, full of a passionate yet shy strength, that some may think is
the result of continual communion with Latin things, with Italy and
Italian work, Italian verse, Italian painting, on the part of a race not
Latin, but without the immobility, the want of versatility, common to
the Germans, which has robbed them of any great painter since the early
Renaissance, and in politics has left them to be the last people of
Europe to win emancipation.

Much of this enlightening effect that Italy has upon the northerner may
be found in the work of Vandyck on his return to Genoa, really a new
thing in the world, as new as the poetry of Spenser had been, at any
rate, and with much of his gravity and sweet melancholy or pensiveness,
in those magnificent portraits of the Genoese nobility which time and
fools have so sadly misused. And as though to confirm us in this thought
of him, we may see, as it were, the story of his development during this
journey to the south in the sketch-book in the possession of the Duke of
Devonshire. Here, amid any number of sketches, thoughts as it were that
Titian has suggested, or Giorgione evoked, we see the very dawn of all
that we have come to consider as especially his own. We may understand
how the pride and boisterous magnificence of Rubens came to seem a
little insistent a little stupid too, beside Leonardo's Virgin and Child
with St. Anne now in the Louvre, which he notes in Milan, or that Last
Supper which is now but a shadow on the wall of S. Maria delle Grazie.
And above all, we may see how the true splendour of Titian exposes the