Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/346

 different rooms, far apart from each other, among various samples of his own school and time; and may be noted at random, single figures and larger groups alike. The artist had less gift of reproducing physical beauty, less lyric loveliness of work, less fullness of visible and contagious pleasure in his execution, than his father; but far more of variety, of flexible emotion, of inventive enjoyment and indefatigable fancy. From the varied and vagrant life of the elder these qualities might rather have been expected to develope in him than in his son; but if Lippo is more of a painter, Lippino is more of a dramatist. To him apparently the sudden varieties and resources of secular art becoming visible and possible conveyed and infused into his work a boundless energy of delight. Much may be traced to his master Botticelli; more to the force of a truly noble blood inherited from the monk and nun his parents, glorious above all their kind for beauty, for courage and genius; most of all to the native impulse and pliancy of his talent. From his teacher we may derive the ambition after new things, the desire of various and liberal invention, the love of soft hints and veiled meanings, with something now and then of the hard types of face and form, the satisfaction apparently found in dry conventional faults, which disfigure the beauty of Botticelli's own pictures. With these types however he was not long content; no faces can be fuller of a lovely life and brilliant energy than many of Lippino's; and his father's incomparable sense of beauty could not but have preserved from grave or continual error even a son who had not inherited and acquired so many and such noble powers. It is singular that some of the