Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/105

 V

LANDOR

F the many lovers of the beautiful, into whose hands, we trust, this collection will fall, shall derive from the study of its gems something of the pleasure experienced in their choice and arrangement, the editors thus will be a second time rewarded for most enjoyable labor. The master-artist, to whose exquisite touch these compositions owe their excuse for being, possessed beyond his contemporaries the liberal faculty which endowed some of the great workmen of the past: the double gift upon which the poets, sculptors, and painters of the golden age, before the era of the specialists, were wont to plume themselves. He had the joyous range of Benvenuto Cellini, whom the chroniclers describe as "founder, gold-worker, and medailleur"; who, in his larger moods, devised and cast the Perseus and other massive bronzes which still ennoble the Italian city-squares; yet who found felicitous moments in which to carve the poniard-handles, vaunted by knights and courtiers as their rarest treasures, or to design some wonder of a cup, [91]