rising to the same level by making the forms borrowed from Michael Angelo convey scraps of modern knowledge. In doing this he could not but confirm the experience, thus described by Goethe in his _Theory of Colour_: "Even the most perfect models are delusive, by causing us to pass over necessary decrees of culture, and thus generally carrying us beyond the goal into a domain of boundless error." [Illustration: CORNELIUS. THE APOCALYPTIC HOST.] At the same time that Heinrich Hess was carrying on his calligraphic exercises after Raphael and Andrea del Sarto in the Basilika at Munich, Cornelius was making his schoolboy sketches after Michael Angelo. What is great in his master is empty _pose_ in him; what is _furia_ in the former is a laboured imitation in the latter. While the terrific Florentine Master found within himself the expression of his superhuman figures, his learned follower copies attitudes, gestures, groups--familiar to anyone who has been to Italy and passed a few hours in the Sistine Chapel. One seems to hear the old Florentine's great voice toned down through the telephone, and irritating us with false pathos at moments when pathos is quite superfluous. All the faces are distorted with grimaces, heads of hair are puffed up as though with serpents, garments fly about; people shout instead of speaking, open their mouths wide as though they were giving the word of command to an army, stretch out their arms as though they would embrace the world. A mother bearing a child in her arms squeezes it to death. A cook roasting a leg of mutton bastes it with a Herculean gesture, and a butler emptying a leather bottle has the air of a river-god meditating a flood. In order that his human beings may look vigorous and heroic, he makes them walk in seven-league boots, dislocate their limbs, expand the gigantic measurement of the body far beyond the human. Every head shows a different colouring: one red as sealing-wax, another rose-pink, a third _caput mortuum_. Added to this, the academic drapery arrangements, those florid garments with their rolling, writhing folds, for which there is no real justification, and which have no use but that of ornament. "Ah," says Goethe, in one of his letters, "how true it is that nothing is remarkable but what is natural: nothing grand but what is natural: nothing beautiful, nothing, etc., etc., but what is natural." Michael Angelo is not at all easy to understand; and Cornelius' study of him resulted in the very same mannerism into which the Dutchmen had fallen three hundred years earlier,--the only difference being that he surpassed them in erudition. But although this quality would no doubt have greatly helped him had he written books, we cannot take it into account in discussing his artistic merits, any more than we can judge Gérard de Lairesse by his literary achievements. Nay, more, as he had elected to confine himself to painting, his erudition became a curse to