we should be wrong,--and extremely wrong. For the hunting and fighting
did practically produce strong, and often virtuous, men; while the
perpetual and inactive contemplation of what it was impossible to
understand, did not on the whole render the contemplative persons,
stronger, wiser, or even more amiable. So that, in the twelfth century,
while the Northern art was only in need of direction, the Southern was
in need of life. The North was indeed spending its valour and virtue on
ignoble objects; but the South disgracing the noblest objects by its
want of valour and virtue.

Central stood Etruscan Florence--her root in the earth, bound with iron
and brass--wet with the dew of heaven. Agriculture in occupation,
religious in thought, she accepted, like good ground, the good;
refused, like the Rock of Fesole, the evil; directed the industry of
the Northman into the arts of peace; kindled the dreams of the
Byzantine with the fire of charity. Child of her peace, and exponent of
her passion, her Cimabue became the interpreter to mankind of the
meaning of the Birth of Christ.

We hear constantly, and think naturally, of him as of a man whose
peculiar genius in painting suddenly reformed its principles; who
suddenly painted, out of his own gifted imagination, beautiful instead
of rude pictures; and taught his scholar Giotto to carry on the
impulse; which we suppose thenceforward to have enlarged the resources
and bettered the achievements of painting continually, up to our own
time,--when the triumphs of art having been completed, and its uses
ended, something higher is offered to the ambition of mankind; and Watt
and Faraday initiate the Age of Manufacture and Science, as Cimabue and
Giotto instituted that of Art and Imagination.