The Madonnas of Italian art received from the painter a solemn beauty not only because they depict Divine maternity, but even too because they were to grace a religious shrine and to constitute part of a religious service. That may be one reason why the Madonnas of Italy are far superior to the prettiness and sentimentality of more recent Madonnas which are painted for private homes and for ephemeral interest. The purpose of the artist is one thing and the purpose of art is another thing. The purpose of a watch is to keep time whatever purpose the watch-maker may have. It is likely, however, that if he makes the watch for his mother, he will produce better results than if he worked for his usual wage or than if he functioned as part of a machine, having no clearly defined ulterior purpose. So an artist will be inspired in painting, in sculpture, in music, in all arts, to elicit better his full powers and to achieve finer results when he toils for a cathedral than when he works for a cabaret. Noble responsibility conscientiously recognized and fulfilled is no check, but rather a spur to the artist. “Art for art’s sake” may, however, be taken to mean, “Embody beauty wherever found, or realize to the full your ideal,” and such a meaning is excellent and fruitful unless excessive individualism insists upon expressing its own perverted ideas of beauty and its own eccentric ideals. When Horace said, “Let justice be done though the heavens come crashing down,” a line that might be rendered, “Justice for justice’s sake,” he was far from advocating the explosion of a bomb by some Roman anarchist whose idea of justice was to bring all to a dead level of ruin. The progressive improvement in the realization of art-ideals may be very well illustrated from the career of Horace. Horace gradually worked himself free from the conventionality and baseness of his epodes and earlier satires, experienced the cleansing process of true humor in later satires, took fire at the moral degeneracy of Rome in the initial odes of the third and last book of his first edited lyrics. There the _sæva indignatio_ of Horace brought him within distant sight of sublimity. His progress in philosophy weighted the wings of his song but dowered him with the crystal and clean wisdom of his epistles, of which it has been said one need not blot out a single line. Had Horace retained the youthful vehemence of the republican amid the enervating peace of the new empire, he might have followed Dante and Milton from lyric beauty to epic sublimity, or might have risen with Shakespeare and Molière from song to comedy or even to tragedy, but his hedonistic sleekness and his excessive self-consciousness kept his ripened philosophy in brief letters, when a more vigorous mentality with the help of philosophy might have converted his ennobled power of satire into comedy or transformed the lyric portraits of his early days into tragedy or epic story. II ART AND THE INDIVIDUAL