274 ARIADNE FLORENTINA. 



tity of time you must nowadays spend in trying which can hit 

 balls farthest. So I will put the task into the simplest form I 

 can. 



Here are the names of the twenty-five men,* and opposite 

 each, a line indicating the length of his life, and the position 

 of it in his century. The diagram still, however, needs a few 

 words of explanation. Very chiefly, for those who know any- 

 thing of my writings, there is needed explanation of its not 

 including the names of Titian, Reynolds, Velasquez, Turner, 

 and other such men, always reverently put before you at other 

 times. 



They are absent, because I have no fear of your not looking 

 at these. All your lives through, if you care about art, you 

 will be looking at them. But while you are here at Oxford, 

 I want to make you learn what you should know of these 

 earlier, many of them weaker, men, who yet, for the very 

 reason of their greater simplicity of power, are better guides 

 for you, and of whom some will remain guides to all genera- 

 tions. And, as regards the subject of our present course, I 

 have a still more weighty reason ; Vandyke, Gainsborough, 

 Titian, Reynolds, Velasquez, and the rest, are essentially por- 

 trait painters. They give you the likeness of a man : they 

 have nothing to say either about his future life, or his gods. 

 ' That is the look of him/ they say : ' here, on earth, we know 

 no more.' 



49. But these, whose names I have engraved, have some- 

 thing to say generally much, either about the future life of 

 man, or about his gods. They are therefore, literally, seers 

 or prophets. False prophets, it may be, or foolish ones ; of 

 that you must judge ; but you must read before you can 

 judge ; and read (or hear) them consistently ; for you don't 

 know them till you have heard them out. But with Sir 

 Joshua, or Titian, one portrait is as another : it is here a 

 pretty lady, there a great lord ; but speechless, all ; whereas, 

 with these twenty-five men, each picture or statue is not 



* The diagram used at the lecture is engraved on the opposite leaf ; 

 the reader had better draw it larger for himself, as it had to be made 

 inconveniently small for this size of leaf. 



