For centuries they were concealed in notebooks scattered through Europe and with difficulty decipherable. Yet they are not embodied in vague utterances or casual intuitions, but display a laborious concentration on the precise details of the difficulties to be overcome; nor was patient industry in him, as often happens, the substitute for natural facility, for he was a person of marvellous natural facility, and, like such persons, most eloquent and persuasive in speech. At the same time his more general and reflective conclusions are expressed in a style combining the maximum of clarity with the maximum of concision,—far, indeed, removed from the characteristic florid redundancy of Italian prose,—which makes Leonardo, in addition to all else, a supreme master of language.[46] Yet the man to whom we must credit these vast intellectual achievements was no abstracted philosopher shut up in a laboratory. He was, even to look upon, one of the most attractive and vivid figures that ever walked the earth. As has sometimes happened with divine and mysterious persons, he was the natural child of his mother, Caterina, of whom we are only told that she was “of good blood,” belonging to Vinci like Ser Piero the father, and that a few years after Leonardo’s birth she became the reputable wife of a citizen of his native town. Ser Piero da Vinci was a notary, of a race of notaries, but the busiest notary in Florence and evidently a man of robust vigour; he married four times and his youngest child was fifty years the junior of Leonardo. We hear of the extraordinary physical strength of Leonardo himself, of his grace and charm, of his accomplishments in youth, especially in singing and playing on the flute, though he had but an elementary school education. Except for what he learnt in the workshop of the many-sided but then still youthful Verrocchio, he was his own schoolmaster, and was thus enabled to attain that absolute emancipation from authority and tradition which made him indifferent even to the Greeks, to whom he was most akin. He was left-handed; his peculiar method of writing long raised the suspicion that it was deliberately adopted for concealment, but it is to-day recognised as simply the ordinary mirror-writing of a left-handed child without training. This was not the only anomaly in Leonardo’s strange nature. We now know that he was repeatedly charged as a youth on suspicion of homosexual offences; the result remains obscure, but there is some reason to think he knew the inside of a prison. Throughout life he loved to surround himself with beautiful youths, though no tradition of license or vice clings to his name. The precise nature of his sexual temperament remains obscure. It mocks us, but haunts us from out of his most famous pictures. There is, for instance, the “John the Baptist” of the Louvre, which we may dismiss with the distinguished art critic of to-day as an impudent blasphemy or brood