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What above all things interests the student of the Renaissance in Filippino's work, is the powerful action of revived classicism on his manner. This can be traced better in the Caraffa Chapel of S. Maria sopra Minerva at Rome and in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella at Florence than in the Carmine.

This mediaeval theory of life was subjected, as is well known, to many compromises in the West, and was materially modified by Teutonic influence and the revival of classicism. It might therefore be supposed that in Islam Christian theory underwent similar modification or disappeared entirely. But the fact is not so.

It is to this period of incipient but ill-understood classicism that belongs the only work of Domenico Neroni at least the only work still extant nowadays which possesses, over and above its artistic or scientific merit, that indefinable quality which we must simply call charm; to this time, with the one exception of the famous woodcuts done for Filarete.

Young artists were wont to attach a sprig of laurel to this work in which the first signs of the coming storm of Romanticism are discerned. This daring and passionate revolt from frigid classicism and preoccupation with a conventional antiquity was received but coldly by the professional critics on its appearance in 1819, though with enthusiasm by the people.

Between them, they made very short work of a cold chicken, a salad, a gooseberry-tart and a Camembert. The Duke filled his glass again and again. The cold classicism of his face had been routed by the new romantic movement which had swept over his soul. He looked two or three months older than when first I showed him to my reader.

No less than the school of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the school of Denham, of Dryden, and of Pope, proclaimed itself as the champion of Nature; and there can be little doubt that Donne himself the father of all the conceits and elaborations of the seventeenth century wrote under the impulse of a Naturalistic reaction against the conventional classicism of the Renaissance.

No, he was not swamped by classicism, but he was affected by it, and just here, and in that self-consciousness which Shakespeare was free from, and which may have been more or less the result of his classic erudition, he fails of being one of the universal poets of mankind.

Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing beyond recovery.

The classicism which followed my parents about in everything of course connected itself with my father's chief luxury, in the form of a bronze match-box, given him in Rome by my sister, upon which an autumn scene of harvest figures was modeled with Greek elegance, and to this we turned our eyes admiringly during the lighting of the cigar.

In our study we have noted: the Augustan or Classic Age; the meaning of Classicism; the life and work of Alexander Pope, the greatest poet of the age; of Jonathan Swift, the satirist; of Joseph Addison, the essayist; of Richard Steele, who was the original genius of the Tatler and the Spectator; of Samuel Johnson, who for nearly half a century was the dictator of English letters; of James Boswell, who gave us the immortal Life of Johnson; of Edmund Burke, the greatest of English orators; and of Edward Gibbon, the historian, famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.