aesthetic judgment. The letters from Venice and the Diary
of his journey in the Netherlands, which form the contents
of this volume, are indeed the singularly fortunate means
for this pleasant intercourse with the man himself. They
reveal Dürer as one of the distinctively modern men of the
Renaissance: intensely, but not arrogantly, conscious of his
own personality; accepting with a pleasant ease the
universal admiration of his genius-a personal admiration,
too, of an altogether modern kind; careful of his fame as
one who foresaw its immortality. They show him as having,
though in a far less degree, something of Leonardo da
Vinci's scientific interest, certainly as possessing a
quick, though naive curiosity about the world and a quite
modern freedom from superstition. It is clear that his
dominating and yet kindly personality, no less than his
physical beauty and distinction, made him the center of
interest wherever he went. His easy and humorous good-
fellowship, of which the letters to Pirkheimer are eloquent,
won for him the admiring friendship of the best men of his
time.

To all these characteristics we must add a deep and sincere
religious feeling, which led him to side with the leaders of
the Reformation, a feeling which comes out in his passionate
sense of loss when he thinks that Luther is about to be put
to death, and causes him to write a stirring letter to
Erasmus, urging him to continue the work of reform. For all
that, there is no trace in him of either Protestantism or
Puritanism. He was perhaps fortunate--certainly as an artist
he was fortunate--to live at a time when the line of