14 love's meinie. 



with the commencement of its decHne. 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 contemporaries, 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 natu- 

 ralistic art was conclusively expressed by the 

 sentence of Donatello, when going one morn- 

 ing into the Old Market, to buy fruit, and 

 finding the animal painter uncovering a pic- 

 ture, 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 shutting 

 it up." 



13. No harm, therefore, I repeat, but, on 

 the contrary, some wholesome stimulus to the 

 fancy of men like Luca and Donatello them- 

 selves, came of the grotesque and impertinent 

 zoology of Uccello, 



