infantile weakness and youthful effervescence, and has triumphantly emerged into well-developed and lusty manhood. Had the Constitution at the outset been committed to other hands, it could have been, and probably would have been, construed in the direction of minimizing its scope and efficiency-of dwarfing and frittering away the powers conferred by it and of making the sovereignty of the nation but a petty thing as compared with the sovereignty of the state. Under Marshall's auspices, however, and his interpretation and exposition of the Constitution, the sentiment of nationality germinated and grew apace, a vigorous national life developed, and an indestructible union of indestructible States became a tangible and inspiring entity, appealing alike to the affections and the reason of men, and in which thus far at least they have seen both the ark of their safety and an ideal for which to willingly lay down their lives. I refer thus to the past because the past is assured and because there are those. who look to the future with apprehension-who do not disguise their fear that the republic of Washington and Marshall is now suffering a mortal assault not from without but from within-not from "foreign levy," but from "malice domestic." Those who take this view include men of both the great political parties and men who deservedly command the highest respect and deference from their fellow countrymen.

Nevertheless, they must not be allowed to lessen our faith in the final triumph of the fundamental ideas which underlie our national life. The fathers did not build upon a quicksand but upon a rock-else the structure they reared could hardly have survived foreign aggression, a disputed succession, and a civil war the greatest and most sanguinary of modern times. But their work was by human hands for human use, and even their wisdom could not guard it against the follies and the sins of all future custodians.

That gross blunders have been committed, blunders unaccountable in their origin and as yet unfathomable in their consequences, may be admitted, is indeed sorrowfully admitted by many, if not a majority, of those who have nevertheless since contributed to keep their official authors in power. But blunders, however inexcusable or

apparently injurious, must be deemed irretrievable only in the last resort, and heaven forbid any admission that the American republic can be wrecked by any one or even two administrations. The truth here, as almost always, lies between extremes-between ultra-conservatives and pessimists on the one hand and ultra-progressives and optimists on the other. The former would put back the hands of the clock a hundred years-would have us live and act as if the conditions of the Washington and Marshall era were still about us-in effect would have us tear up the railroad and sink the steamship and return the lightning to the heavens whence Franklin brought it down. The latter would have us believe that, to act well our part on the world-wide stage which alone limits the activities of modern civilized states, we must ape the fashionable international follies and vices of the period even to the point of warring upon, subjugating, and exploiting for trade purposes 8,000,000 of alien peoples in the Pacific seas, 7,000 miles from our own shores. Between these extremes lies the path of honor, of morality, of safety and of patriotism, and, notwithstanding present aberrations, the American people may be absolutely trusted sooner or later to find it and to walk in it. They will certainly not forget that this is the dawn of the Twentieth, not of the Nineteenth century. They will just as certainly determine that to be in touch with the best thought and temper of the time, to be the most truly progressive of all peoples, to do every duty and fulfil every function required by its high place in the world-they will certainly determine that to do and to be all this-neither means that the American nation must imitate the most questionable practices of other states nor requires any abandonment of American principles or American ideals. To believe or to hold otherwise is to despair of the Republic, and to despair of the Republic is to lose faith in humanity and in the future of the race.

The incalculable debt of the country to the two great Virginians, impossible of repayment, can never be too often or too emphatically recognized by the entire body of the American people. Upon the bar, however, devolves an especial duty, namely, to see to it that the merits of its incomparable chief are not obscured by the showier

deeds of warriors and statesmen. The observance of this day, therefore, by the lawyers of the country generally is eminently appropriate, while we in this corner of the land | are exceptionally favored in that Virginia has lent us for our celebration one of the foremost of her lawyers and citizens [Henry St. George Tucker]. In recognition of the honor of his presence and in appreciation of the immense services of his native State to the cause of a stable and coherent nationality, I propose that the company rise and drink to the ever-increasing prosperity of the Commonwealth of Virginia and to the good health and long life of her distinguished representative on this occasion.

[Address of Walter Pater, critic of art and literature (born in London, 1839; died in Oxford, July 30, 1894), delivered at Oxford, August 2, 1892, before the University Extension students.]

66

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. Yet, if we follow the actual growth of his powers, within their proper framework, the age of the Renaissance --an age of which we may say, summarily, that it enjoyed itself, and found perhaps its chief enjoyment in the attitude of the scholar, in the enthusiastic acquisition of knowledge for its own sake: if we thus view Raphael and his works in their environment we shall find even his seemingly mechanical good fortune hardly distinguishable from his own patient disposal of the means at hand. Facile master as he may seem, as indeed he is, he is also one of the world's typical scholars, with Plato, and Cicero, and Virgil, and Milton. The formula of his genius, if we must have one, is this: genius by accumulation; the transformation of meek scholarship into genius-triumphant power of genius.

Urbino, where this prince of the Renaissance was born in 1483, year also of the birth of Luther, leader of the other great movement of that age, the ReformationUrbino, under its dukes of the house of Montefeltro, had wherewithal just then to make a boy of native artistic faculty from the first a willing learner. The gloomy old

fortress of the feudal masters of the town had been replaced, in those later years of the Quattro-cento, by a consummate monument of Quattro-cento taste, a museum of ancient and modern art, the owners of which lived there, gallantly at home, amid the choicer flowers of living humanity. The ducal palace was, in fact, become nothing less than a school of ambitious youth in all the accomplishments alike of war and peace. Raphael's connection with it seems to have become intimate, and from the first its influence must have overflowed so small a place. In the case of the lucky Raphael, for once, the actual conditions of early life had been suitable, propitious, accordant to what one's imagination would have required for the childhood of the man. He was born amid the art he was, not to transform, but to perfect, by a thousand reverential retouchings. In no palace, however, but in a modest abode, still shown, containing the workshop of his father, Giovanni Santi. But here, too, though in frugal form, art, the arts, were present. A store of artistic objects was, or had recently been, made there, and now especially, for fitting patrons, religious pictures in the old Umbrian manner. In quiet nooks of the Apennines Giovanni's works remain; and there is one of them, worth study, in spite of what critics say of its crudity, in the National Gallery. Concede its immaturity, at least, though an immaturity visibly susceptible of a delicate grace, it wins you nevertheless to return again and again, and ponder, by a sincere expression of sorrow, profound, yet resigned, be the cause what it may, among all the many causes of sorrow inherent in the ideal of maternity, human or divine. But if you keep in mind when looking at it the facts of Raphael's childhood, you will recognize in his father's picture, not the anticipated sorrow of the "Mater Dolorosa" over the dead son, but the grief of a simple household over the mother herself taken early from it. That may have been the first picture the eyes of the world's great painter of Madonnas rested on; and if he stood diligently before it to copy, and so copying, quite unconsciously, and with no disloyalty to his original, refined, improved, substitutedsubstituted himself, in fact, his finer self, he had already struck the persistent note of his career. As with his age, it is his vocation, ardent worker as he is, to enjoy himself