humour than a Hebrew prophet; they had no eye for the more trivial
side of anything round about them. This aspect went in at one eye
and out at the other--and they lost more than ever poor Peter Bell
lost in the matter of primroses. I never can see what there was to
find fault with in that young man.

Fancy a street-Arab by Michael Angelo. Fancy even the result which
would have ensued if he had tried to put the figures into the
illustrations of this book. I should have been very sorry to let
him try his hand at it. To him a priest chucking a small boy under
the chin was simply non-existent. He did not care for it, and had
therefore no eye for it. If the reader will turn to the copy of a
fresco of St. Christopher on p. 209, he will see the conventional
treatment of the rocks on either side the saint. This was the best
thing the artist could do, and probably cost him no little trouble.
Yet there were rocks all around him--little, in fact, else than
rock in those days; and the artist could have drawn them well
enough if it had occurred to him to try and do so. If he could
draw St. Christopher, he could have drawn a rock; but he had an
interest in the one, and saw nothing in the other which made him
think it worth while to pay attention to it. What rocks were to
him, the common occurrences of everyday life were to those who are
generally held to be the giants of painting. The result of this
neglect to kiss the soil--of this attempt to be always soaring--is
that these giants are for the most part now very uninteresting,
while the smaller men who preceded them grow fresher and more
delightful yearly. It was not so with Handel and Shakespeare.
Handel's