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15

Landscape and a Water-Spout.

(WINDSOR LIFRARY.)

[graphic][subsumed]

may be compared to the symbolical flora, given by Alciati in his Emblems (1531). The different kinds of trees are passed in review according to their signification:

The pine that waves upon the mountain

Plays well its part upon the sea;

In change of place it often chances
Men find their opportunity.

The chief actors in the Fables are: the owl and the tunny fish, the mouse and the badger, the spider and the grape, the monkey and the little birds, the dog and the sheepskin, the falcon and the duck, the cedar and its fruit, the peach-tree and the walnut, the walnut and the wayfarers, the fig-tree and the passers-by, the fig-tree and the elm, the bay-tree, the myrtle, and the pear, the chestnut and the fig-tree, the willow.

The nature and value of these little compositions may be gathered from a few extracts. An ant found a grain of millet-seed; the latter, feeling itself grasped, cried out, "If you will only be good enough to allow me to accomplish my destiny (to multiply) I will give you a hundred beings like myself." And so it was arranged! A plant complains of the old dried post they have set beside it, and of the withered trunks with which she is surrounded. The one holds her upright, the others protect her from uncomfortable neighbours. A razor being taken one day out of the handle which encased it and laid in the sun, saw its body reflect the sunlight, and became puffed up with pride. Thinking it over he said to himself, "Shall I return to the shop from which I came a while ago? Certainly not!" So he hid for several months, but coming out at last into the daylight, he perceived that he looked like a rusty saw. . . This is what happens to people who give themselves up to idleness, instead of to the proper exercise of their powers. Like the razor they lose their edge, and the rust of ignorance destroys their form.

The Prophecies, or rather the sections of Leonardo's writings. cryptograms characteristic of the types of those Emblems to which Alciati was soon to give so great

Enigmas, form one of the strangest They belong to the class of subtle Renaissance, and are worthy proto

a vogue. Here again we encounter ants, bees, rams, cows, goats, donkeys, nuts, olives, chestnuts, cats, mice, etc. "We shall see," says Leonardo, "the nourishment of animals entering through their skin without passing through the mouth, and coming out at the opposite side to fall on the ground (Explanation: sieves).—The bones of the dead decide the fortunes of those who handle them by their rapid movements (dice)."

Here again we have to do with an old and well-known publication, for we find at least one of Leonardo's enigmas in the Notti of his compatriot Straparola, who issued his Sonetti, Strambotti, Epistole et Capitoli as early as 1508. The sonnet which concludes the third story of the fifth Notte runs upon the transformation into dice of dead

men's bones.

We may judge from these few extracts how interesting the poems in prose of Leonardo are, and how, if the plastic conciseness and stirring eloquence of Michelangelo are absent, we find instead a great wealth of imagery, and the art of rendering in words effects which had previously been confined to painting. Everything in them is sincerely felt and observed, qualities too rare in the refined and artificial literature of sixteenth-century Italy to be passed over in silence.

Side by side with the poet we find the moralist and thinker.

In the Codex Atlanticus (fol. ii) we find this maxim, touched a little with bitterness, set down in connection with an instrument for measuring time: "We must make this instrument in order to divide the hours, so that this life of misery may not be entirely wasted, and that our memory may not fade from the minds of men." (Richter, vol. ii., p. 293–297.)

"Much greater than the glory reflected upon mortals by their wealth is that which comes from virtue (or talent). How many

princes and emperors have disappeared and are forgotten! If you excuse yourself by invoking the necessity for providing for your children, well, they do not require very much; act so that they will be nourished by their virtues, for these are faithful riches which only quit us with life. If you put forward the necessity for

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