[4] This was first pointed out to me by a friend--Mr. Robin Allen. It is a beautiful thought; yet, possibly, an after-thought, I have some suspicion that there is an alteration in the plate at that place, and that the rope to which the bell hangs was originally the line of the chest of the nearer horse, as the grass-blades about the lifted hind leg conceal the lines which could not, in Durer's way of work, be effaced, indicating its first intended position. What a proof of his general decision of handling is involved in this "repentir"! [5] "Yet withal, you see that the Monarch is a great, valiant, cautious, melancholy, commanding man"--Friends in Council, last volume, p. 269; Milverton giving an account of Titian's picture of Charles the Fifth. (Compare Ellesmere's description of Milverton himself, p. 140.) Read carefully also what is said further on respecting Titian's freedom, and fearless with holding of flattery; comparing it with the note on Giorgione and Titian. CHAPTER V. CLAUDE AND POUSSIN. § 1. It was stated in the last chapter that Salvator was the last painter of Italy on whom any fading trace of the old faithful spirit rested. Carrying some of its passion far into the seventeenth century, he deserved to be remembered together with the painters whom the questioning of the Reformation had exercised, eighty years before. Not so his contemporaries. The whole body of painters around him, but chiefly those of landscape, had cast aside all regard for the faith of their fathers, or for any other; and founded a school of art properly called "classical,"[1] of which the following are the chief characteristics. § 2. The belief in a supreme benevolent Being having ceased, and the sense of spiritual destitution fastening on the mind, together with the hopeless perception of ruin and decay in the existing world, the imagination sought to quit itself from the oppression of these ideas by realizing a perfect worldly felicity, in which the inevitable ruin should at least be lovely, and the necessarily short life entirely happy and refined. Labor must be banished, since it was to be unrewarded. Humiliation and degradation of body must be prevented since there could be no compensation for them by preparation of the soul for another world. Let us eat and drink (refinedly), for to-morrow we die, and attain the highest possible dignity as men in this world, since we shall have none as spirits in the next. § 3. Observe, this is neither the Greek nor the Roman spirit. Neither Claude, nor Poussin, nor any other painter or writer, properly termed "classical," ever could enter into the Greek or Roman heart, which was as full, in many cases fuller, of the hope of immortality than our own.