The novelty of the art of printing, and the convenience to a nomadic emperor of a monument that could be rolled up, suggested the form of this last absurdity--a monster woodcut in 92 blocks which, when joined together, produced a picture 9 feet by 10, representing what had at first been intended as an imitation of a Roman triumphal arch; but so much information about so many more or less dubious ancestors, &c., had to be conveyed by quaint and conceited inventions, that in the end it was rather comparable to the confusion of a Juggernaut car, which never-the-less imposes by a barbarous wealth and magnificence of fantastic detail. And to this was to be joined another monster, representing on several yards of paper a triumphal procession of the emperor, escorted by his family, and the virtues of himself and ancestors, &c. Such is fortune's malice that Dürer, who alone or almost alone had conceived of the simplicity of true dignity and the beauty of choice proportions and propriety, should have been called upon by his only royal patron to superintend a production wherein the rank and flaccid taste of the time ran riot. The absurdity, barbarism, and grotesque quaintness of this monument to vanity cannot be laid exclusively at Maximilian's door; for the architecture, particularly of the fountains, in Altdorfer's or Manuel's designs, and in those of many others, reveals a like wantonness in delighted elaboration of the impossible and unstructural. The scholars and pedantic posturers who surrounded the emperor no doubt improved and abetted. Probably it was this Juggernaut element, inherited from the Gothic gargoyle, which Goethe censured when he said that "Dürer was retarded by a gloomy fantasy devoid of form or foundation." Perhaps this was written at a period when the great critic was touched with that resentment against the Middle Ages begotten by the feeling that his own art was still encumbered by its irrational and confused fantasy. We who certainly are able to take a more ample view of Dürer's situation in the art of his times, see that he is rather characterised by an effort which lay in exactly the same direction as that of Goethe's own; and while sympathising with the irritation expressed, can also admire the great engraver for having freed himself in so large a degree from the influence of fantasy "devoid of form and foundation," even as the justest Shakespearean criticism admires the degree in which the author of Othello freed himself from Elizabethan conceits. It is difficult to appreciate the difference for a great artist in having the general taste with rather than against the purer tendencies of his art. Probably the Greeks and certain Italians owe their freedom from eccentricity, in a very large measure, to this cause. But I intend to treat these questions more at length in dealing with Dürer's character as an artist and creator. It was necessary to touch on the subject here, because