"Raphael was in truth the greatest of artists, because the most comprehensive, blending as he did the opposing tendencies of the mystics and the naturalists into a perfect whole by reverent study of nature and of the antique. Bred in a devotional school of art, and transferred to an atmosphere charged with classical ideas, he retained enough of the first, while he absorbed enough of the second, to make him a painter of works Christian in spirit and Greek in elegance and purity of form and style." Raphael will live, not only through his works but through the adoration we all pay to a lovable character. The perennial fountain of goodness and sweetness in Raphael's soul, which "won for him the favor of the great," as Giovio said, while living, has won for him the homage of the world, now that he is dead. He had by nature a sunny, kindly disposition: he had what every person living may have, and would do well to cultivate: a spirit that did not find fault, lips that spoke no censure of anybody, but praise where praise was possible, and such self-control that not an enemy was ever made by his temper or his lack of consideration for others. He was enthusiastic, but he had the self-poise of a great nature. True, his life was short. As Grimm says, "Four single statements exhaust the story of his life: he lived, he loved, he worked, he died young." He helped everybody, and what more is there in life than this? TITIAN. "If I were required," says Mrs. Jameson, "to sum up in two great names whatever the art of painting had contemplated and achieved of highest and best, I would invoke Raphael and Titian. The former as the most perfect example of all that has been accomplished in the expression of thought through the medium of form; the latter, of all that has been accomplished in the expression of life through the medium of color. Hence it is that, while _both_ have given us mind, and _both_ have given us beauty, _Mind_ is ever the characteristic of Raphael--_Beauty_, that of Titian. [Illustration: TITIAN.] "Considered under this point of view, these wonderful men remain to us as representatives of the two great departments of art. All who went before them, and all who follow after them, may be ranged under the banners of one or the other of these great kings and leaders. Under the banners of Raphael appear the majestic thinkers in art, the Florentine and Roman painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and Albert Dürer, in Germany. Ranged on the side of Titian appear the Venetian, the Lombard, the Spanish, and Flemish masters. When a school of art arose which aimed at uniting the characteristics of both, what was the result? A something second-hand and neutral--the school of the Academicians and the _mannerists_, a crowd of painters who neither felt what they saw, nor saw what they felt; who trusted neither to the God within them, nor the nature around them; and who ended by giving us Form without Soul--Beauty without Life."