RELATION OF ENGRAVING TO OTHER ARTS. 271 



And Dr. Woltmann has allowed himself too easily to fall 

 into the common notion of Liberalism, that bad art, dissemi- 

 nated, is instructive, and good art isolated, not so. The 

 question is, first, I assure you, whether what art you have got 

 is good or bad. If essentially bad, the more you see of it, 

 the worse for you. Entirely popular art is all that is noble, 

 in the cathedral, the council chamber, and the market-place ; 

 not the paltry coloured print pinned on the wall of a private 

 room. 



43. I despise the poor ! do I, think you ? Not so. They 

 only despise the poor who think them better off with police 

 news, and coloured tracts of the story of Joseph and Poti- 

 phar's wife, than they were with Luini painting on their 

 church walls, and Donatello carving the pillars of their 

 Market-places. 



Nevertheless, the effort to be universally, instead of locally, 

 didactic, modified advantageously, as you know, and in a 

 thousand ways varied, the earlier art of engraving : and the 

 development of its popular power, whether for good or evil, 

 came exactly so fate appointed at a time when the minds 

 of the masses were agitated by the struggle which closed in 

 the Reformation in some countries, and in the desperate re- 

 fusal of Reformation in others.* The two greatest masters of 

 engraving whose lives we are to study, were, both of them, 

 passionate reformers : Holbein no less than Luther ; Botticelli 

 no less than Savonarola. 



44. Reformers, I mean, in the full and, accurately, the only, 

 sense. Not preachers of new doctrines ; but witnesses 

 against the betrayal of the old ones which were on the lips of 

 all men, and in the lives of none. Nay, the painters are indeed 

 more pure reformers than the priests. They rebuked the 

 manifest vices of men, while they realized whatever was love- 

 liest in their faith. Priestly reform soon enraged itself into 

 mere contest for personal opinions ; while, without rage, but 

 in stern rebuke of all that was vile in conduct or thought, 

 in declaration of the always-received faiths of the Christian 



* See Carlyle, Frederick, Book III., chap. viii. 



