Again, the seventh discourse is replete with inspiring suggestions about French architecture,[63] and in the last discourse the description of Albert Dürer is one which, in a few lines, gives a complete and vividly interesting setting to the great name.
"Albert Dürer may be regarded as _par excellence_ the typical German artist--far more so than his great contemporary Holbein. He was a man of a strong and upright nature, bent on pure and high ideals; a man ever seeking, if I may use his own characteristic expression, to make known through his work the mysterious treasure that was laid up in his heart; he was a thinker, a theorist, and, as you know, a writer; like many of the great artists of the Renaissance, he was steeped also in the love of science. His work was in his own image; it was, like nearly all German art, primarily ethic in its complexion; like all German art it bore traces of foreign influence--drawn, in his case, first from Flanders and later from Italy. In his work, as in all German art, the national character asserted itself above every trammel of external influence. Superbly inexhaustible as a designer, as a draughtsman he was powerful, thorough, and minute to a marvel, but never without a certain almost caligraphic mannerism of hand, wanting in spontaneous simplicity--never broadly serene. In his colour he was rich and vivid, not always unerring as to his harmonies, not alluring in his execution--withal a giant."
When the last addresses were given Leighton was getting very tired. The wheels were running down--vitality was waning. The great mental machine had begun to work more mechanically. We trace this in the manner in which he tackled his last discourse. While writing it at Perugia he wrote to his elder sister:--
You have misconstrued my knee; I have no _pain_ in it, at most occasionally a dull ache in the muscles and a slight soreness in the joint; but it is an incapacitating and depressing nuisance, and it won't move on. (I am writing near a window opening on to a clear, star-bright sky; far below, in the _paese_, I hear the tinkle of a wandering, nocturnal mandoline--how I like it!) You do me the honour to appreciate my having, during my recent precipitate odyssey, visited thirty towns in thirty days, noting things of which I had already accurate knowledge _d'avance_; but I can "go one better" than that: _ten_ of the towns were _absolutely new_ to me, and of the whole subject on which I am preaching, I knew as good as nothing when you last saw me. I suspect that, in spite of a lack of memory which _baffles belief_, I have a certain "uptaking" knack. My preachment will bore you, but you will (if you read it) detect an _ensemble_; but, for goodness' sake, _zitti!_ They'll think, when they hear the P.R.A., that, Lor' bless him! he'd known it all his life. Nevertheless, enough for the day, &c. Best love to Gussy.--Affect. bro.,