No less has the comparative study of art gradually refined people's sensibility to originality. We are no longer compelled to place an artist on the same level with a master of ancient art because of the outer resemblance of their work. We have progressed so far as to respect in art none but original genius, and to look upon imitation as a _testimonium paupertatis_ though Praxiteles or Michael Angelo be the model. In this we find the explanation of the low esteem in which some of the old masters are now held. The contemporaries of Mabuse and Marten Heemskerk thought that in these painters they had found again the great primeval, Titanic nature of Michael Angelo, his vast motives and majestic forms. To-day we say of them, and with justice, that they produced nothing better than caricatures of Michael Angelo, that they expressed themselves in shallow phrases, that their religious pictures are cold and inflated, and that their mythological presentations with naked figures impress us as bombastic and repellent. Houbraken, in his biography of Gérard de Lairesse, wrote: "A whole book could be filled with the description of his innumerable pictures and panels, ceilings and frescoes." To-day we dismiss this unattractive mannerist in a few lines. What his contemporaries described as his Michaelangelesque and majestic fierceness appears to us, looking back, as a mere pale imitation. [Illustration: CORNELIUS. MARGUERITE IN PRISON.] Measure Cornelius by the same rule, and the result is no less melancholy. Merciless history paused for a moment to consider whether it ever saw his equal, and then passed on to the order of the day, as it did with his predecessors. To us he is no longer the original genius that he was to his contemporaries, but an imitator. The retrospective history of art marks a new epoch with him, Heinrich Hess, and Schnorr: the advance from the paths of the early Italians, trodden by the Nazarenes, to this link with the golden age of the Cinquecento. The works of Cornelius are mighty shadows cast into our days by the gigantic figures of Michael Angelo. But only shadows! There is no blood in them. A direct line leads from Michael Angelo to Millet; but I doubt whether the master would delight in Cornelius, who has only used him as a _gradus ad Parnassum_. The works of Cornelius are the products of a civilised yet artistically poor period. The idealism of Michael Angelo had raised itself upon the naturalistic shoulders of Donatello and Ghirlandaio; this new Cornelian idealism sprang into being full-grown from reminiscences, and was therefore from the outset without backbone. It is the fruit of a decadence, not the mature product of a full-blown art, which has taken centuries to grow and ripen. In Michael Angelo the aspirations of Italian art, from Giotto onward, attained their zenith. Cornelius, standing solitary in an inartistic period that had lost every tradition and all technical method, believed in the possibility of