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the beautiful and luxurious, and yet there is not a single note of vicious taste. In this the Madonna, of the most ethereal beauty, sits with an infant upon her knees, bending gracefully forward, serene and blessed. Around her hover a circle of joyous angels; the two at either extreme form an arch with their arms, holding a crown over her head; three others gaze in artless benignity upon an open book over which she holds a pen; and while it is painted with a wealth of delicious color-flashes of pale rose and turquoise, gold and green, with floating, diaphanous draperies yet the whole color scheme is kept subservient to the central idea and sentiment. The glow of light upon the face of the Mother is one of the most masterly things in art, and serves to focus attention upon the real intention of the work. It is upon these two pictures that Botticelli must be judged-not but that there are many and varied excellences in much of his other work, but on them he has shown his ultimate strength in his peculiar province.

The Uffizi "Annunciation" is more comprehensive and more ambitious in composition: two full-length figures; the Virgin kneeling at her devotions is suddenly aware of the presence of God's messenger, and turns with bowed head and outstretched arms, meekly and gracefully accepting the great blessing. The action of flying, or alighting after flight, is most charmingly expressed in the pose of the angel and in the floating lines of his garments; in color it is dull, owing to the smoke of the altar candles which burned before it for three centuries, and to injudicious restoration; and perhaps it is not entirely by the master's hand; yet it shows a great grasp of the truths of nature, and breathes a most marked religious sentiment.

Botticelli seems to have deeply felt the beauty of nature and endeavored to place his figure "out-doors," as in the Louvre "Madonna ;" and though he has evidently in this case not studied his head in the open, yet the charm of nature is freely given in the rose blossoming hedge and the foliage in the background, relieved as it is against a brilliant sky of pale turquoise. With all our knowledge of to-day, the "values"

VOL. IV.-76

of this landscape could not be better expressed; the composition is most natural and original, and were it not for the lack of truth in the "values" of the figures, and for the intense piety of the sentiment, it might have been painted yesterday. In this picture the infant Saviour is particularly well and feelingly given, which was not usual with Botticelli. He seems always to have concentrated himself upon the Madonna, as the central and important element of his work, and to have given his whole soul to the realization of that figure.

It would be asking too much to expect that Botticelli could have remained entirely outside of the current of classical thought, so ripe in his time, due to the revival and discovery of the remains of a great refinement; and yet he did to an extent. He did not fill his pictures with broken columns or restored Roman buildings, and his heart was evidently not in the Venuses and allegorical pictures his patrons called upon him to paint. It is not as a pagan painter that he excelled, and yet there are passages in some of his later and heathen work which the world could ill spare, notably a certain wonderfully truthful figure of Spring in his "Birth of Venus," a most graceful conception, with flying, flowerembroidered garments; but in this, almost the latest of his works, is plainly shown a great advance. This figure is studied in the open, and no better effect of suffused out-door light was ever painted upon a human face. In his large representation of "Spring," at the Academy in Florence, painted for one of the Medici, wrongly and blindly called his best work, he has painted a group of the Graces with so much feeling and so tender a grace that they seem to be Madonnas masquerading in mythology; he was far too serious and pious to be able to let himself down to such work. He simply could not understand any gods but the gods of the Christians, and the beauty he gave to them is as unique in its way, and as different from Greek beauty, as the foundation of Christianity is different from the scheme of Heathenism.

A true painter should be judged from his work only. He then shows all there is of him for good or evil; he cannot

then disguise his soul. Botticelli's temperament, so judged, shows him to have been of the highest artistic nature-impulsive, pious almost to fanaticism (history tells us he was one of the Piagnone of Savonarola)—and to have possessed an overwhelming love of the beautiful. In him there was no power of apostolic rebuke; he inspires no feeling of terror, nor portrays the hysterical horror of the crucifixion. He points out the "primrose path" to Heaven, and wins by gentleness. He chose for his theme the most tender of all the doctrines of his faith, a subject most commonly painted by all that brilliant concourse of Cinquecentists before and after him; yet never in any manner was his conception approached by any of them. His creations of the Madonna are more perfect in piety, more Christian in sentiment, and more truthful in detailed perfection than any the world has ever seen, and always painted with an originality and freshness characteristic of only the greatest of masters.

the best order, and his place in art should be in the rare atmosphere of the greatest heights; but he speaks in so gentle a note, in such quiet tones, that only the gifted can hear them. While he lived he was at one time called the most considerable painter of Florence, and yet he died in poverty, dependent upon the bounty of his patron. Like a true artist he had no time for the commonplace things of life, and though his work was widely sought, he was often idle for a long time, knowing that when the creative faculty is weary, work is but an unworthy sham.

Even in his Florence to-day, in the great Pitti gallery, one of his most sincere and perfect works hangs in an obscure corner, while all down that succession of splendid rooms, in the centre of the walls, and in the best and quietest lights, hang the works of Del Sarto and Raphael and their inferiors. But in the English National Gallery, where ten years ago Botticelli's Madonna was hanging high up and in obscurity, it is toThere was never a question in his day enshrined upon a screen, in the best work; he instinctively avoided the com- place in that magnificent gallery, and is monplace; no matter with what fidelity admired by thousands. This incident is he attempted to present nature, animate evidence of the return to true art under or inanimate, his temperament made it the influence of the "New Renaissance" easy for him to render it with the ap--that of the latter half of the nineteenth propriate sentiment. His genius was of

century.

BE KIND TO THYSELF.

By E. S. Martin.

COMES the message from above-
"As thyself, thy neighbor love."
With myself so vexed I grow—
Of my weakness weary so,
Easier may I tolerate

My neighbor than myself not hate.

Take not part of thee for whole.

Thou art neighbor to thy soul;

The ray from Heaven that gilds the clod

Love thou, for it comes from God.

Bear thou with thy human clay

Lest thou miss the heaven-sent ray.

I

MEMORIES OF THE LAST FIFTY YEARS.

Macready.

By Lester Wallack.

THIRD PAPER.

HAVE frequently been asked, both by interviewing people and by my friends, what my method of study is, almost every actor having a method; and apropos of this there comes in an anecdote about Macready. He always objected to a redundancy of gesture, and once said to my father: "My dear Wallack, you are naturally graceful; I am not. I know that in gesture I do not excel, and facial expression is what I principally depend upon. In fact, I absolutely make Mrs. Macready tie my hands behind my back and I practise before a large glass and watch the face." My father replied: "Well, Macready, I suppose that is all very good,

but did you ever try it with your legs tied?"

But in answer to this question which has been so often asked concerning my method of study, I may say that the first thing is to get a thorough knowledge of the play. At first I generally studied the other parts even a little more than I thought of my own; and when I came to my own I studied it scene by scene to get the words perfect. I did not think so much of what I was going to do with them until I got them so correctly that I could play with them in two or three different ways. Having one scene in my head I would go to the next, there being perhaps two or three scenes in one act. I would then go to work to perfect the first act as a whole. My first thought was to try to get the author's meaning; to pay that respect which was his due by carefully following his text. Having done that, I worked on the different modes of expressing the author, picked what I thought was best, etc., and then put that act by. Suppose we had four acts, for instance; I would then study the second after the same fashion, and so on, using the same method all through with the four. I studied alone, of course, at first; but when I thought myself sufficiently au fait I would get Mrs. Wallack, or one of my sons, to hear me in the part, and then play it in two or three different ways in order to see how it affected them. While I was perfect in the room, the moment I got upon the stage at rehearsal the positions, uses of furniture, etc., interrupted all this. The use of these had to be blended properly with what I had done before. With a chair here and a table there, and the footlights here and the audience there, I had to study how all this could be worked in so as to make as perfect an ensemble as possible.

I do not know the systems of other artists, but that was mine. Of course, after all this preparation, when I came

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