love's meinie. 15 



exactly coeval with the commencement of its decline. 

 The feverish and ungraceful natural history of Paul, 

 called, " of the birds," Paolo degli Uccelli, produced, 

 indeed, no harmful result on the minds of his contempo- 

 raries; they watched in him, with only contemptuous 

 admiration, the fantasy of zoological instinct which filled 

 his house with painted dogs, cats, and birds, because he 

 was too poor to fill it with real ones. Their judgment of 

 this morbidly naturalistic art was conclusively expressed 

 by the sentence of Donatello, when going one morning 

 into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and finding the animal 

 painter uncovering a picture, which had cost him months 

 of care, (curiously symbolic in its subject, the infidelity of 

 St. Thomas, of the investigatory fingering of the natural 

 historian,) " Paul, my friend," said Donatello, " thou art 

 uncovering the picture just when thou shouldst be shut- 

 ting it up." 



13. IN'o harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on the contrary, 

 some wholesome stimulus to the fancy of men like Luca 

 and Donatello themselves,, came of the grotescpie and 

 impertinent zoology of Uccello. 



But the f atallest institutor of proud modern anatomical 

 and scientific art, and of all that has polluted the digni- 

 ty, and darkened the charity, of the greater ages, was 

 Antonio PoHajuolo of Florence. Antonio (that is to say) 

 the Poulterer — so named from the trade of his grand- 

 father, and with just so much of his grandfather's trade 

 left in his own disposition, that being set by Lorenzo 



