APPENDIX. 405 



they become total simpletons. Look at Rubens' mythologies 

 in the Louvre, or at modern French heroics, or German piet- 

 isms ! Why, all Cornelius, Hesse, Overbeck, and David put 

 together, are not worth one De Hooghe of an old woman with 

 a broom sweeping a back-kitchen. The one thing we north- 

 erns can do is to find out what is fact, and insist on it : mean 

 fact it may be, or noble, but fact always, or we die. 



Yet the intensest form of northern realization can be 

 matched in the south, when the southerns choose. There are 

 two pieces of animal drawing in the Sistine Chapel unrivalled 

 for literal veracity. The sheep at the well in front of Zip- 

 porah ; and afterwards, when she is going away, leading her 

 children, her eldest boy, like every one else, has taken his 

 chief treasure with him, and this treasure is his pet dog. It 

 is a little sharp-nosed white fox-terrier, full of fire and life ; 

 but not strong enough for a long walk. So little Gershom, 

 whose name was " the stranger " because his father had been 

 a stranger in a strange land, little Gershom carries his white 

 terrier under his arm, lying on the top of a large bundle to 

 make it comfortable. The doggie puts its sharp nose and 

 bright eyes out, above his hand, with a little roguish gleam 

 sideways in them, which means, if I can read rightly a dog's 

 expression, that he has been barking at Moses all the morn- 

 ing, and has nearly put him out of temper : and without any 

 doubt, I can assert to you that there is not any other such 

 piece of animal painting in the world, so brief, intense, vivid, 

 and absolutely balanced in truth ; as tenderly drawn as if it 

 had been a saint, yet as humorously as Landseer's Lord Chan- 

 cellor poodle. 



Oppose to Holbein's Veracity Botticelli's Fantasy. 

 " " Shade " Colour. 



" " Despair " Faith. 



" " Grossness " Purity. 



True Fantasy. Botticelli's Tree in Hellespontic Sibyl. Not 

 a real tree at all yet founded on intensest perception of beau- 

 tiful reality. So the swan of Clio, as opposed to Durer's cock, 

 or to Turner's swan. 



