the south of the Alps art overran the peninsula with a luxuriance not to be checked, spreading on all sides like a wild flower. On the north, the plant, where it lived at all, was hardy and strong, but scanty and even stunted; confined to isolated patches, and never expanding to the full measure of its capacity. Here also a peculiar but unenviable characteristic must be taken into consideration, namely the claims of the northern schools to an undivided originality. Nothing can be truer than that German art rose from a separate root of its own, with no admixture, as with the Italians, from a classic source. To Italy descended the great heritage of Greek feeling, transmitted, it is true, through the almost moribund channel of Byzantine art, and crossed with many a puny native stock. But in that inheritance the German schools had no part; their merits and defects are both strictly their own-a fact which will need to be remembered in analysing the art of the great master before us.

But to return to political conditions. In these respects north and south were more upon a par. If Italy with its contending princes and its distracted people could not, in the modern sense of the word, be called a Nation, as little could Germany claim that appellation. Both were but conglomerations of inadhesive parts; perennially engaged in the destruction of the weaker by the stronger; preying on each other like animalcula in a drop of ditch water; petty dukes and princes intent only on devouring their neighbour; pope and emperor, unless quarrelling together, ready to pounce on victor and victim alike; and the formidable Turk the perpetual terror of all. If the ineffable poetry of Italy could do little to soften this scene, in Germany it was absolutely unmitigated. Even the conventional patronage of superstition and vanity was failing here. The rich headquarters of the Church were far off, and both the ecclesiastical and secular powers were represented by men for whom, even in the sense of luxury and flattery, arts and letters had no attrac tion. The fortified dwellings of bishops and counts were not the homes of minstrels and sonneteers; nor were the strongholds of baronial violence and rapacity the nurseries of schools of art.

The first feeble stirrings of pictorial art in Germany were the work of men of whom in most instances we know not the names, and, in a few, nothing more than the names. They proceed from localities which in some degree explain their production. Ancient Cologne on the west, the thoroughfare of nations, communicating commercially with the Netherlands and with Venice; and Prague on the east, under the Emperor

*The Northern schools mixed ill with the Renaissance: ride such painters as Mabuse, Bernhard van Orley, and others.

Charles

Charles IV., who summoned an Italian to adorn his castle of Carlstein, and is thus believed to have inoculated native artists -these are the two regions whence the spark appears to have been first struck. An abbey and a convent, here and there, show an altar-piece curious for the connoisseur, but of which nothing is known beyond its obvious relationship to one of these sources.

It is not too much to say that the leading features which characterized the Germany of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may still be recognised in the nation at the present day. It has meanwhile suffered from wars and devastations unexampled in history for public misery, the scars of which are still discernible; and it has developed a range of power, poetical, philosophical, and scientific, which place it in the highest ranks of intellect; but, in one respect, Germany is unaltered and apparently unalterable. Its noblesse' so-called is less lawless, but it may be doubted whether it be less mischievous or weigh less obstructively on the land than in earlier days. History teaches us that true patriotism is not to be looked for from a caste dependent for its importance on the repression of those below them. Such a body, like the Polish noblesse, care only for themselves, never for the interests and liberties of the people. The German Adel' is unfortunately distinguished by two broad marks, incompatible with the conditions of a real aristocracy, and fatal to the harmony and union of a country-namely, infinitesimally divided fortunes, and incalculably multiplied titles. Not comparable with our landed gentry in wealth, consequence, or usefulness, it has yet a jealousy of contact or commixture with its untitled fellow-citizens, which would be thought equally ridiculous and monstrous in an English duke. Indeed, while the laws of our country on the one hand uphold the true dignity and position of the English nobility, the laws of nature, on the other, bind them in the closest ties with the classes below them-classes to which their junior descendants happily revert. Thus the ranks of the great central body of the nation are reinforced, to the infinite good of all, equally from above and from below; a chain of mutual interest running through society, in which not a link is missing. The English nobleman who represents a great family cannot separate himself from the commoners of his land if he would; the German noble, all the members of whose family, male and female, whether fifty or five hundred in number, assume the same title, cannot do otherwise. True to their fatal traditions, they hold themselves at the same fictitious distance from their fellow burghers, on a rigidly maintained line running for ever parallel but never meeting; thus leaving a chasm between class and class doubly

hurtful

hurtful to the country; for it is manned with empty arrogance on the one side and deadly hatred on the other. How a nation possessing such reasoning powers should not perceive that if a nobility be a desirable class at all, the law of primogeniture is far less a boon to the individual than a safeguard for all, is a question which every Englishman conversant with German life cannot fail to ask himself. To him it is apparent that, even admitting the principle of primogeniture, as practised in England, to be unjust-as a benefit to one member of a family at the expense of all the others, which is the favourite Teutonic argument against it-it is an injustice which the Germans practise on a far more serious scale; for theirs is the primogeniture of an entire class at the expense of all their fellow citizens.

It were well too if the feeling excited in the middle classes of Germany by these fictitious distinctions were only that of scorn, for that is allied to moral nobility: but it is to the example of the noblesse that is traceable that ignoble greed for petty titles which pervades the whole body politic, and which, taking all ranks together, has made of Germany, and especially of Berlin, little more, socially speaking, than a magnified Krähwinckel. With such influences as these overshadowing a great community, no diffusion of light and warmth from above, no patronage of art and letters worthy the name, is possible. A mob of needy noblesse are seen, especially in Prussia, swarming in court and army, content to bear in most cases the merest fraction of a title rather than none; families without heads, and unfortunately without terminations, usurping the prerogatives of rank without acknowledging its duties; and holding themselves above entering the learned professions, much in the same way as the Emperor Sigismund held himself to be super grammaticam.'

With such influences, we repeat, still weighing on the same land, we can judge somewhat of the contempt for the arts of peace, as well as for the rights of humanity, which prevailed in the ruder times of Germany's most unhappy history. Who can wonder, therefore, that the only two men who ever rose to the level of great artists should have sprung from the sole refuges, comparatively speaking, of law and liberty which existed in the country, namely, from the free imperial cities-Albert Dürer from Nuremberg, and Holbein from Basle and Augsburg?

We are not inclined to theorize with Herr Thausing, that the fact of Nuremberg's position on the map, about midway between Cologne and Prague, was conducive to the rise of its art. The ancient city-whose names chroniclers derive from Nero!exemplifies in a general way what would occur everywhere with the same causes. It had no available water communication,

and

and no vineyards: but the grant of free rights and privileges by the Emperor Frederic II. at the beginning of the thirteenth century, gradually entailed industry and commerce; these, in their turn, riches; and with riches arose the desire for the enjoyment of letters and taste, such as could be had at that time. Of all the free towns in Germany in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Nuremberg was the most important and prosperous. No place ever more strictly illustrated the modern axiom, that labour is the sole source of wealth. With a population numbering at one time about 70,000 souls, it presented a picture of comparative independence and unlimited industry, which contrasted the more strongly with the lawlessness of the knights' castles and the sloth of the episcopal seats. Many were the proverbs to which Nuremberg gave rise―one, at the expense of a neighbouring bishopric, deserves to be recorded: 'Were Nuremberg mine, I would spend her at Bamberg:' the first representing industry and thrift, the second ease and indolence.

While dealing with various forms of commerce, engrossing the carrying trade between East and West, and forming the chief mart for the products of both, Nuremberg was especially distinguished by a vein of ingenuity and invention peculiar to herself: whence another proverb, Nuremberg's hand is in every land.' From this ingenuity there was but a short cut to the rise of art, in the only forms within the scope of the homely community. In the total absence of any feeling for refinement in the higher classes of the country, German art owes its origin to the people themselves. Embodied in the simple and comparatively accessible forms of rude woodcuts and engravings, it possessed the advantage of dispensing with patronage. No one was needed to order this class of art; the artist expressed his own ideas within the limit of the religious routine of the day, and trusted securely to the popular demand for a sale. Thus a certain independence ensued, however humble the transactions, better in keeping with the habits of a free, trading community, than the conditions which then existed on the other side of the Alps. the circumstances in Nuremberg, when the great artist, who was destined to carry these simple forms of art to their highest development, was ushered into the world.

Such were

The family of Albert Dürer were Hungarian by birth, though believed to be of German origin. They tended flocks and herds. in the neighbourhood of Grosswardein. From this lowly state the grandfather of our master detached himself, and became apprentice to a goldsmith in a little town called Gyula, thus sowing that seed of future art not seldom traceable in the

genealogy

genealogy of great artists. The father, Albert by name, followed in the same craft, and in those Wanderjahre,' when the German Bursch' passes from town to town, taking alms on the way, he worked for some master goldsmith in the Netherlands, and finally made his way to Nuremberg. He is stated to have arrived there during the open-air festivities attendant upon a marriage in the Pirkheimer family, when the sight of the rich silver vessels, which in Nuremberg then paid no tax, decided him to remain in such a land of promise for goldsmiths. At that time, though not for long, Nuremberg formed an exception to other German towns in its exemption from all taxes and close guilds in trade. Not only had the citizens acknowledged labour as the source of all wealth, but they forestalled another principle of political economy, and kept that labour free. This exemption extended to art as well; and it is said that on one occasion the engravers and woodcutters of Nuremberg could obtain no redress against a fellow-artist, whose participation, he being the hangman of the town, they conceived to be derogatory to the profession; the only answer they obtained being the reminder, that the arts were free to all.

Thus Albert Dürer the elder, being an able workman, obtained ready employment in the workshop of a master goldsmith, and in the natural course of things married his master's daughter in his own words, a pretty, straight, young maiden,' called Barbara. This took place in 1467, she being then fifteen, and he forty. We are assured that he rose high in the esteem of his fellow-citizens, but that no riches fell to his share, which may be accounted for by the fact that his wife presented him with eighteen children. His portrait, painted by his son in 1489-now in the Uffizi at Florence-shows an earnest, determined countenance, of no beauty or likeness to the young artist; the hands, which hold a rosary, are finely drawn.

By this time the descendants of the Hungarian cowherds bore arms, for on the back of this picture are two shields, one showing a golden door (Thür'), half open, on a red ground: the family, in the long-rooted and superb indifference of the German race to the distinction between certain dentals and labials, being as often called Thürer as Dürer.

Albert Dürer, the hero of this biography, was the third child and second son of this prolific couple. He was born in 1471 in the Pirkheimer House, where his father lodged, opposite the 'Beautiful Fountain'—a fact which may have trained the youthful eye in those minutiæ of form in which it subsequently delighted. Nowhere, certainly, could he have had greater opportunities for studying those quaint and picturesque archi

tectural