Of all Dürer's paintings of the Madonna, there is only one which, by its superb design, deserves special notice among his masterpieces. This _Madonna with the Iris_ exists in two versions, both unfinished; one the property of Sir Frederick Cook, the other at Prague, in the Rudolphium. This latter Mr. Campbell Dodgson considers to be a poor copy. The panel is badly cracked, and weeds and long grasses have been added, apparently with a view to masking the cracks. Judging from a photograph alone, many of these additions seem so appropriately placed and freely sketched that I feel it at least to be possibly a work by the master himself. On the other hand, Sir Frederick's picture is so sleepy and clumsy in handling, that though it is unfinished, and perhaps in part damaged by some restorer, I feel great hesitation in regarding it as Dürer's handiwork. In both cases the magnificent design is his, and that alone in either is fully representative of him. Mr. Campbell Dodgson ventures to criticise the profusion of drapery as excessive, but my feeling, I must confess, endorses Dürer's in this, rather than that of his learned critic. To me this profusion, and the grandeur it gives as a mass in the design, is of the very essence of what is most peculiarly creative in Dürer's imagination. The last picture of which it is necessary to speak is that of the _Four Apostles_ or the _Four Preachers_, as they have been more appropriately called; it was perhaps the last he painted, and is in many respects the most successful. It is the only one by which the comparison with Raphael, so dear to German critics, seems at all warranted: there is certainly some kinship between Dürer's St. John and St. Paul and apostolic figures in the cartoons or on the Vatican walls. The German artist's manner is less rhetorical, but his conception is hardly less grandiose; and his taste does not so closely border on over-emphasis, but neither is it so conscious or so fluent. Technically it seems to me that the chief influence is a recollection of the large canvases of Jan and Hubert Van Eyck and Hubert Van der Goes which Dürer had admired in the Netherlands; these had strengthened and directed the bias of his self-culture towards simple masses on a large scale.[74] He may very well have sought to combine what he learnt from them with hints he found in the engravings after Raphael which he obtained in Antwerp. His increasing sickness may probably account for the fact that the white mantle of St. Paul is the only portion quite finished. The assertion of the writing-master, Johann Neudörffer, who in his youth had known Dürer, that the four figures are typical of the four temperaments, the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic,--into which categories an amateurish psychology arbitrarily divided human characters,--is as likely to be correct as it is certain that it adds nothing to the power and beauty of the presentation. Though Dürer in his