“By his immense productiveness, by the even perfection of what he produced, its fitness to its own day, its hold on posterity, in the suavity of his life, some would add in the ‘opportunity’ of his early death, Raphael may seem a signal instance of the luckiness, of the good fortune, of genius.” This is an admirable summary; and he adds that upon a careful examination of his works “we shall find even his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his own patient disposal of the means at hand.” He goes on to show that the supreme charm of Raphael’s nature was in his teachableness, his prompt assimilation of influences, his essential humility and tranquillity; that his genius was not a vivid, tortured thing, like a lightning-flash, with prodigious efforts long matured in the womb of the cloud, with intervals of despairing silence and ineffectiveness—but a tranquil, equable progress: “genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius.” Pater says, indeed, that Raphael may be held to be the supreme example of the truth of the beatitude that the meek shall inherit the earth. He traces the steps of this progress. He shows him stainless, unruffled, untainted by the restlessness of the age that flowered in sin, and yet able by a supreme insight to transfer the hinted presence of fantastic evil into his pictures; he shows his gradual mastery of dramatic intensity, till he could concentrate the whole of a picture on one point, subordinate the whole scene to some central and poignant emotion. And he brings out, too, with great skill, that Raphael was always in his own thought a learner, with no desperate prejudice for originality, always open to influence, yet transfiguring and transmuting influence into higher and higher conceptions of his own. At last he brings him to Rome, where his life seems “as we read of it, hasty and perplexed, full of undertakings, of vast works not always to be completed, of almost impossible demands on his industry, in a world of breathless competition, amid a great company of spectators, for great rewards.” Among these mighty tasks stands foremost his divergence into architecture, appointed, as he was, to succeed Bramante as architect of St. Peter’s. But all through shines out the unspoilt nature, making its charm felt upon artists and courtiers alike, the same unhasting, unresting diligence, the same smiling youthfulness of demeanour.