nothing mean or debasing found a place in his inventions, and homely accessories were either refined or thrown into shade. On the banks of the Arno he became acquainted with another class of elegant forms, wherein the ancients had developed a beau-ideal, faultless in its external qualities, but alien to religious sentiment. The reaction against paganism, which Savonarola's eloquence had effected in the Tuscan capital, contributed perhaps to save Raffaele from this snare; but at the court of Rome, and more especially under the Medicean Leo, the temptation became too strong. Before the twofold seduction of incarnate beauty and classic forms, the types of his pristine admiration were gradually effaced, and his fidelity to them waxed faint. After elevating Christian painting to its culminating point, he lent himself unwittingly to its degradation, by selecting depraved loveliness equally for a Madonna or a Venus, by designing from it indiscriminately a Galatea or a saint. True, that what he lost in purity is, in the opinion of many, more than counterbalanced by his progress towards breadth and vigour; but without entering upon so wide an element of controversy, we may note the fact that, though all his pupils boldly followed that "new manner," their career was one of rapid descent, and that those who departed most widely from their master's purest conceptions have obtained least admiration from posterity. Yet we must in a great measure acquit Raffaele of participating in the corruption which he shrank from combating. No work of depraved taste or immoral tendency has been brought home to his pencil, though the dissolute habits of his age readily applauded such libertinism in Giulio Romano, Titian, and Correggio. As to the long current statement, that his premature death was a well-earned result of vicious indulgences, the evidence, when sifted by recent research, entitles him to at least a negative verdict. No contemporary testimony gives the slightest countenance to the charge. It originated in a vague and random sentence of a commentator upon Ariosto, wherein four assertions out of six are palpably unfounded, and its gossiping character procured it a too ready admission from Vasari. The pure character of his works meets it with an effectual contradiction, on which those who best understand physiological conformation will most implicitly rely:-- "Love is too earthly, sensual for his dream; He looks beyond it with his spirit eyes."