No, such pagan scenes are mere burlesques, coarse mummeries, such as may have amused Nürnberg and Augsburg during Shrovetide, when drunken louts figured as Bacchus and sang drinking songs by Hans Sachs. There is no reality in all this; there is no belief in pagan gods. If we would see the haunting divinity of the German Renaissance, we shall find him prying and prowling in nearly every scene of real life; him, the ever present, the king of the Middle Ages, whose triumph we have seen on the cloister wall at Pisa, the lord "Death." His fleshless face peers from behind a bush at Zatzinger's stunted, fever-stricken lady and imbecile gentleman; he sits grinning on a tree in Orso Graf's allegory, while the cynical knights, with haggard, sensual faces, crack dirty jokes with the fat, brutish woman squatted below; he puts his hand into the basket of Dürer's tattered pedlar; he leers hideously at the stirrup of Dürer's armed and stalwart knight. No gods of youth and Nature; no Hercules, no Hermes, no Venus, have invaded his German territories, as they invaded even his own palace, the burial-ground at Pisa; the antique has not perverted Dürer and his fellows, as it perverted Masaccio, and Signorelli, and Mantegna, from the mediæval worship of Death. The Italians had seen the antique and had let themselves be seduced by it, despite their civilization and their religion. Let us only rejoice thereat. There are indeed some, and among them the great English critic, who is irrefutable when he is a poet and irrational when he becomes a philosopher;--there are some who tell us that in its union with antique art, the art of the followers of Giotto embraced death, and rotted away ever after; there are others, more moderate but less logical, who would teach us that in uniting with the antique, the mediæval art of the fifteenth century purified and sanctified the beautiful but evil child of Paganism, that the goddess of Scopas and the athlete of Polyclete were raised to a higher sphere when Raphael changed the one into a Madonna, and Michel Angelo metamorphosed the other into a prophet. But both schools of criticism are wrong. Every civilization has its inherent evil; antiquity had its' inherent evils, as the Middle Ages had theirs; antiquity may have bequeathed to the Renaissance the bad with the good, as the Middle Ages had bequeathed to the Renaissance the good with the bad. But the art of antiquity was not the evil, it was the good of antiquity; it was born of its strength and its purity only and it was the incarnation of its noblest qualities. It could not be purified, because it was spotless; it could not be sanctified because it was holy. It could gain nothing from the art of the Middle Ages, alternately strong in brutal reality, and languid in mystic inanity; the men of the Renaissance could, if they influenced it at all, influence the antique only for evil; they belonged to an inferior artistic civilization, and