In Cranford,' Mrs. Gaskell depicted a nice old clergyman, the father of Miss Matty, Rector of Cranford, whose only title to fame was that he preached a sermon before a judge at the Assizes. This was printed by request, and there were great cogitations as to who should have the honour of printing it. The rector had to take several journeys to London to see it through the press. He adopted a quite Ciceronic style of writing in consequence, and had his portrait painted with a large wig and holding in his hand the precious sermon.

Modern authors have not disdained to bring the clergy frequently into their books. Stanley Weyman has published a very pretty story called the New Rector,' and my friend "Morice Gerard" wrote the story of a very modern parson in The New Order,' in the course of which he describes the wife of a bishop, "Lady Mary," an aristocrat by birth and early education, who had striven for years to put on democratic garments, which, fitting none too well, seemed to have been constructed for someone else. Mr. Baring-Gould, whose literary record is so amazing, wrote a novel on the iniquitous Parson Froude, the hunting, bruising parson, who appears in "The Maid of Sker.' I should like to have shown to you that admirable portrait of an old-time parson drawn by the inimitable pen of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, but time forbids.

In conclusion, as a parson, perhaps I may be allowed to express the hope that we of the present age may be able to maintain the reputation which Thomas Fuller states the clergy of England gained in former times, who (so he wrote) "for their living,

preaching and writing, have been the main champions of truth against error, of learning against ignorance, of piety against profaneness, of religion against superstition, of unity and order against faction and confusion, verifying the judicious observation of foreigners:

'CLERUS BRITANNIAE GLORIA MUNDI.''

AN ALL-EMBRACING GENIUS: LEONARDO

DA VINCI.

BY ANTONIO CIPPICO, R.S.L.

Professor of London University.

[Read October 22nd, 1919.]

THERE are very few human individuals, only half a dozen perhaps, or not more than four, who have been chosen by God worthily to become the highest exponents of our Western civilisation. Demi-gods, placed by their genius on a level far above the loftiest summits attained by humanity, collectively or individually, in its hard and toilsome daily aspiration towards some sort of evolution, they live for ever in an atmosphere which is nearer to that crystalline heaven (cielo cristallino) that was imagined and coloured by Dante than to the petty and limited human battle which is our incessant and unavoidable struggle for life.

Their bodies hardly vanished from earthly existence before legend got hold of them, and, violently snatching them from the sepulchre of history, enveloped them with the iridescent veils of myth. Homer, the άodós who sang his grave songs at the dawn of our Mediterranean civilisation, was a vaguer personality even than a myth at the time of his human life-if he ever existed: we know more, it would seem, about the life and the frolics of the VOL. I, N.S.

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singing mermaids surrounding the ship of Odysseus than about the birth, the life and the death of this Great Shadow which, from the threshold between Asia and Europe, still haunts our unquenched longings for dream-woven knowledge. Without Homer neither Aeschylus nor Pindar would mean much to us; without him neither the Athena Parthenos of the Acropolis nor the motherly figure of the Cnidian Demeter would have added any new charm to our taste: both Plato and Parmenides would have uttered quite different words to us, Virgil's poem would have dealt with some other subject, and all we know of the Greek greatness, on which Rome based its own greatness, and gave its laws to the contemporary and future humanity, would have followed a different path, would have evolved with a different rhythm.

The same things could be said of Dante and of Shakespeare, creators and moulders of worlds. Without attempting to measure the immediate or far-reaching effects of their appearance among us, without even tracing the ephemeral accidents and the dates of their human existence, we cannot consider them now but in the light of their legend. Their cradles and their biers are out of our sight long since. It little matters if their ashes enrich the sacred soil of Ravenna and Stratford-on-Avon. As the corpse of Romulus, in the corner of the Forum, wrapped in flames, became the god Jupiter Quirinus, the bodies of the two greatest poets that modern times gave birth to have completely vanished from our earth, and have been transhumanated and translated to the azure top of heaven. We do not

possess a single manuscript line from their own hands. But for the few and doubtful signatures of the god who gave life to Hamlet, every material trace of their writing has disappeared. It belongs to myth, just as the manuscripts of the poet of the Lakedaemonian Helen and of Ithakian Odysseus. The same lot practically befell the fourth representative genius of our civilisation, Leonardo da Vinci. His bones are not to be found any more, after four centuries only, in the church of St. Florentin, which was annexed to the Castle of Cloux at Amboise. A skeleton which was found on the crypt of the Choir by M. Henri Houssaye less than sixty years ago (August 20th, 1863), with his skull reposing on a hand, and which for its measure (five foot five) was considered to be perhaps that of the painter of the "Gioconda," has disappeared. Although there still are in the world the muchdisputed series of some of his pictures, and the scattered seven thousand pages of his own writings and drawings, the same atmosphere of legend enshrouding the three representative geniuses just mentioned surrounds the man whose life and thought and work are, if possible, even more mysterious than the life and thought and work of his three peers.

Leonardo, the love-child of Ser Piero d'Antonio da Vinci, and of Caterina, the peasant girl "of good blood," as she is recorded by the "Anonimo Gaddiano,” was throughout his life a constant object of wonder and admiration to his teachers and disciples, to his friends and enemies, from Verocchio to Andrea VOL. I, N.S. 5§