King Francis, then at his court of St. Germain-en-Laye, is said to have wept for the loss of such a servant; that he was present beside the death-bed and held the dying painter in his arms is a familiar but an untrue tale. After a temporary sepulture else where his remains were transported on Aug. 12 to the cloister of St. Florentin according to his wish. He left all his mss. and apparently all the contents of his studio, with other gifts, to Melzi, whom he named executor; to Salai and to his servant Battista Villani a half each of his vineyard outside Milan ; gifts of money and clothes to his maid Maturina; one of money to the poor of the hospital in Amboise; and to his half-brothers a sum of 400 ducats lying to his credit at Florence.
Achievements.—History tells of no man gifted in the same degree as Leonardo was at once for art and science. In art he was an inheritor and perfecter, born in a day of great and many sided endeavours on which he put the crown, surpassing both predecessors and contemporaries. In science, on the other hand, he was a pioneer, working wholly for the future, and in great part alone. That the two stupendous gifts should in some degree neu tralize each other was inevitable. The mere attempt to conquer the kingdom of light and shade for the art of painting was des tined to tax the skill of generations. Leonardo sought to achieve that conquest and at the same time to carry the old Florentine excellences of linear drawing and psychological expression to a perfection of which other men had not dreamed. The thirst for knowledge had first been aroused in him by the desire of perfecting the images of beauty and power which it was his business to create.
Thence there grew upon him the passion of knowledge for its own sake. In the splendid balance of his nature the Virgilian longing, rerurn cognoscere causas, could never indeed wholly silence the call to exercise his active powers. But the powers he cared most to exercise ceased by degree to be those of imaginative creation, and came to be those of turning to practical human use the mastery which his studies had taught him over the forces of nature. In science he was the first among modern men to set himself most of those problems which unnumbered searchers of later generations have laboured severally or in concert to solve. A hundred years before Bacon, say those who can judge best, he showed a firmer grasp of the principles of experimental science than Bacon showed, fortified by a far wider range of actual ex periment and observation. Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Harvey— he knew what each of them would one day discover. He was Watt's precursor; only he meant steam to project a missile from a cannon ; experts aver that, had he at his disposal some power like petrol, he would have completed his mechanic of aviation; he knew a method of remaining a long time under water, but he refused to tell of it because of "the evil nature of man." Had
Leonardo left behind him any one with zeal and knowledge enough to extract from the mass of his mss. some portion of his labours in those sciences and give them to the world, an incalculable impulse would have been given to. all those enquiries by which mankind has since been striving to understand the laws of its being and control the conditions of its environment. As it was, these studies of Leonardo—"studies intense of strong and stern delight"—seemed to his trivial followers and biographers merely his whims and fancies, ghiribizzi, things to be spoken of slight ingly and with apology. The mss., with the single exception of some of those relating to painting, lay unheeded and undivulged until the present generation.
So much for the intellectual side of Leonardo's character. As a moral being we are less able to discern what he was like. The man who carried in his brain so many images of subtle beauty, as well as so much of the hidden science of the future, must have lived spiritually, in the main, alone. Of things communi cable he was at the same time, as we have said, communicative— a genial companion, a generous and loyal friend, impressing all with whom he was brought in contact by the power and the charm of genius, and inspiring fervent devotion and attachment in friends and pupils. We see him full of tenderness to animals; open-handed in giving, not eager in getting—"poor," he says, "is the man of many wants"; not prone to resentment—"the best shield against injustice is to double the cloak of long-suffering"; zealous in labour above all men—"as a day well spent gives joy ful sleep, so does a life well spent give joyful death." With these instincts and maxims, and with his strength, spent ever tunnelling in abstruse mines of knowledge, his moral ex perience is not likely to have been deeply troubled. In religion, he regarded the faith of his age and country at least with imaginative sympathy and intellectual acquiescence, if no more. On the political storms which shook his country and drove him from one employment to another, he seems to have looked not with the passionate participation of a Dante or a Michelangelo but rather with the serene detachment of a Goethe. In matters of the heart, if any consoling or any disturbing passion played a great part in his life, we do not know it ; we know only (apart from a few passing shadows cast by calumny and envy) of affectionate and dignified relations with friends, patrons and pupils, of public and private regard mixed in the days of his youth with dazzled admiration, and in those of his age with something of reverential awe.