This intuition into the pure emanations of nature, Raphael Sanzio possessed in the most enviable degree, from the utmost conflict of passions, to the enchanting round of gentler emotion, and the nearly silent hints of mind and character. To this he devoted the tremendous scenery of that magnificent fresco, known to you all under the name of the _Incendio del Borgo_, in which he sacrificed the historic and mystic part of his subject to the effusion of the various passions roused by the sudden terrors of nocturnal conflagration. It is not for the faint appearance of the miracle which approaches with the pontiff and his train in the back-ground, that Raphael invites our eyes; the perturbation, necessity, hope, fear, danger, the pangs and efforts of affection grappling with the enraged elements of wind and fire, displayed on the foreground, furnish the pathetic motives that press on our hearts. That mother, who but half awake or rather in a waking trance, drives her children instinctively before her; that prostrate female half covered by her streaming hair, with elevated arms imploring Heaven; that other who over the flaming tenement, heedless of her own danger, absorbed in maternal agony, boldly reaches over to drop the babe into the outstretched arms of its father; that common son of nature, who careless of another's woe, intent only on his own safety, liberates a leap from the burning wall; the vigorous youth who followed by an aged mother bears the palsied father on his shoulder from the rushing wreck; the nimble grace of those helpless females that vainly strive to administer relief--these are the real objects of the painter's aim, and leave the pontiff and the miracle, with taper, bell and clergy--unheeded in the distance. I shall not at present expatiate in tracing from this source the novel combinations of affection by which Raphael contrived to interest us in his numerous repetitions of Madonnas and Holy Families, selected from the warmest effusions of domestic endearment, or in Milton's phrase, from "all the charities of father, son, and mother." Nor shall I follow it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of local manners and national modifications of society, whose characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the vulgar. Invention in its more specific sense receives its subjects from poetry or authenticated tradition; they are _epic_ or sublime, _dramatic_ or impassioned, _historic_ or circumscribed by truth. The first _astonishes_; the second _moves_; the third _informs_.