level on which Michelangelo moves with certainty and ease--"the greatest
of known artists," so Mr. Lafarge has ventured to acclaim him; and just
as Shakspere is unsurpassed as a poet and also as a playwright, just as
Cicero takes a foremost place as an orator and also as a writer of
prose, so Michelangelo is mighty as a sculptor, as an architect, and as
a painter.

As a painter he has more rivals than as a sculptor. We may limit the
supreme masters of the plastic art to two, or to three at the most; but
the supreme masters of the pictorial art are twice three, at the very
least. By the side of Michelangelo there is Raphael, also an Italian;
and has any one really a right to exclude Titian from their fellowship?
Then there are Velasquez, the Spaniard, and Dürer, the German. And
farther north in the Netherlands, there are Rembrandt and Rubens; and
ought not Vandyke to be allowed to stand aloft with them? Six, at the
lowest count, and eight by the more liberal estimate, are the men who
have gone to the forefront in the art of the brush, half of them from
the north and half of them from the south; and among them all not one
who had English for his native speech, and not one whose mother-tongue
was French. Indeed, at least one German, Holbein, and two or three more
Italians would be admitted within the sacred enclosure before any
Frenchman or any Englishman could have free entry.

Those who speak French and those who speak English fare no better when
we turn from the arts of peace to the art of war. Every race takes pride
in the renown of the far-sighted and swift-striking commanders who have
led it to victory, and every race is prone to over-estimate the military
genius of its own successful soldiers. Here in the United States we
seek to set up Washington and Grant and Lee as the rivals of the most
gifted warriors that the old world has to show in all the long centuries