of fashion, to the very end in all of it. An immense number of people,
incapable of genuinely admiring anything for its own sake at all, are
anxious only to be told what they "ought to admire, don't you know," and
will straightway proceed as conscientiously as they can to get up an
admiration for it. A friend of mine told me a beautiful example. Two
aspiring young women, of the limp-limbed, short-haired, æsthetic
species, were standing rapt before the circular Madonna at the Uffizi.
They had gazed at it long and lovingly, seeing it bore on its frame the
magic name of Botticelli. Of a sudden one of the pair happened to look a
little nearer at the accusing label. "Why, this is not Sandro," she
cried, with a revulsion of disgust; "this is only Aless." And
straightway they went off from the spot in high dudgeon at having been
misled as they supposed into examining the work of "another person of
the same name."

Need I point the moral of my apologue, in this age of enlightenment, by
explaining, for the benefit of the junior members, that the gentleman's
full name was really Alessandro, and that both abbreviations are
impartially intended to cover his one and indivisible personality? The
first half is official, like Alex.; the second affectionate and
familiar, like Sandy.

Still, even after making due allowance for such humbugs as these, a vast
residuum remains of people who, if born sixty years ago, could never by
any possibility have been made to see there was anything admirable in
Lippi, Botticelli, Giotto; but who, having been born thirty years ago,
see it without an effort. Hundreds who read these lines must themselves
remember the unmistakable thrill of genuine pleasure with which they
first gazed upon the Fra Angelicos at San Marco, the Memlings at Bruges,
the Giottos in the Madonna dell' Arena at Padua. To many of us, those