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The date of this letter, which puzzled the worthy annotator, is clearly to be referred to Edward's return from York, after his visit to Middleham in 1469. No mention is therein made by the gossiping contemporary of any rumour that Edward had suffered imprisonment. He enters the city in state, as having returned safe and victorious from a formidable rebellion.
He can appreciate their enormous learning, their unwearied labour, their sense of honour in their profession; and the editor of texts, the collator of various readings and emendations, the annotator who to us perhaps seems but a learned pedant appears to him as a man of sound and philosophic thought, of enthusiasm for truth and light perhaps of genius a man, too, with human affections and interests, with a history not devoid of romance.
Savage informs us that he was once asked by a descendant of the father whether he had received before his death tidings of the execution of his old master. The annotator is able to quote a letter from Roger Williams, "to his honored kind friend, Mr. Williams of ye high news about the king."
A closing, jagged phrase reappears as the first theme of the Finale. The Adagio and Scherzo are built upon the same figure of bass. The theme of the Trio is acclaimed by a German annotator as the reverse of the first motive of the symphony. In the prelude of the Finale, much as in the Ninth of Beethoven, are passed in review the main themes of the earlier movements.
And Botticelli? Was Botticelli a "comprehensive" as those with the sixth or synthetic sense have been named by Lombroso? Botticelli, beginning as a goldsmith's apprentice (Botticello, the little bottle), ended as a painter, the most original in all Italy. His canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set forth the categories whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily, yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist on the flat surface of his picture. He painted the usual number of Madonnas, like any artist of his period; yet he did not convince his world, or the generations succeeding, that this piety was orthodox. Suspected during his lifetime of strange heresies, this annotator and illustrator of Dante, this disciple of Savonarola, has in our times been definitely ranged as a spirit saturated with paganism, and still a mystic. Doesn't the perverse clash in such a complex temperament give us exotic dissonances? All Florence was a sounding-board of the arts when Botticelli walked its narrow ways and lived its splendid coloured life. His sensitive nature absorbed as a sponge does water the impulses and motives of his contemporaries. The lurking secrets of the "new learning" doctrines that made for damnation, such as the recrudescence of the mediæval conception of an angelic neuter host, neither for Heaven nor Hell, not on the side of Lucifer nor with the starry hosts were said to have been mirrored in his pictures. Its note is in Citt
Lord Palmerston gave a large subscription. See post, May 15, 1783. See Boswell's Hebrides, post, v. 48. See ante, p. 171. Quoted by Boswell, ante, iii. 324. It is suggested to me by an anonymous Annotator on my Work, that the reason why Dr. Piozzi's Collection, where it appears that he recommended 'dried orange-peel, finely powdered, as a medicine. BOSWELL. See ante, ii. 330.
On folios 93 to 95 we find characters like those given in fac-simile No. 5, which it requires more experience than ours in record-reading entirely to decipher. On the reverse of folio 95 the annotator, apparently weary of his task, stayed his hand.
In reading through these incomparable notes on Shakespeare we soon cease to lament, or even to remember, their unconnected form and often somewhat desultory appearance; if, indeed, we do not see reason to congratulate ourselves that the annotator, unfettered by the restraints which the composition of a systematic treatise would have imposed upon him, is free to range with us at will over many a flower-strewn field, for which otherwise he could not perhaps have afforded to quit the main road of his subject.
There is great beauty, great eloquence, in this music. It has sincerity, dignity, and reserve, yet it is both deeply impassioned and enamoringly tender; and it is as absolutely personal, as underived, as was Tristan forty years ago. The score of Pelléas et Mélisande ill brooks the short and ruthless method of the thematic annotator.
Yet he does not on that account suppose that his own locomotive power is in any respect to be compared to his horse's; neither need an annotator on Hume, when pointing to holes in his author's metaphysical coat, be supposed not to be perfectly aware that it is the strength, not of his own eyes, but of the spectacles furnished to him by his author, that enables him to perceive them.
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