Chapter XIII: Front Matter (13)

DURAO, JOSE DE SANTA RITA (1720-1784), Brazilian poet, was born near Marianna, in the province of Minas Geraes, in 1720, and died in Lisbon in 1754. He studied at Coimbra, in Portugal, graduated as a doctor of divinity, became a member of the Augustinian order of friars, and obtained a great reputation as a preacher. Having irritated the minister Pombal by his defence of the Jesuits, he retired from Portugal in 1759; and, after being imprisoned in Spain as a spy, found his way to Italy in 1763, where he became acquainted with Alfieri, Pindemonte, Casti and other literary men of the time. On his return to Portugal he delivered the opening address at the university of Coimbra for the year 1777; but soon after retired to the cloisters of a Gratian convent. At the time of his death he taught in the little college belonging to that order in Lisbon. His epic in ten cantos, entitled _Caramuru, poema epico do descubrimento da Bahia_, appeared in Lisbon in 1781, but proved at first a total failure. Its value has gradually been recognized, and it now ranks as one of the best poems in Brazilian literature--remarkable especially for its fine descriptions of scenery and native life in South America. The historic institute of Rio de Janeiro offered a prize to the author of the best essay on the legend of Caramuru; and the successful competitor published a new edition of Durao's poem. There is a French translation which appeared in Paris in 1829.

See Adolfo de Varnhagen, _Epicos Brazileiros_ (1845); Pereira da
Silva, _Os Varoes illustres do Brasil_ (1858); Wolf, _Le Bresil
litteraire_ (Berlin, 1863); Sotero dos Reis, _Curso de litteratura
Portugueza e Brazileira_, vol. iv. (Maranhao, 1868); Jose Verissimo,
_Estudos de literatura Brazileira, segunda serie_ (Rio, 1901).

DURAZZO (anc. _Epidamnus_ and _Dyrrachium_; Albanian, _Durresi_; Turkish and Slavonic, _Drach_), a seaport and capital of the sanjak of Durazzo, in the vilayet of Iannina, Albania, Turkey. Pop. (1900) about 5000. Durazzo is about 50 m. S. of Scutari, on the Bay of Durazzo, an inlet of the Adriatic Sea. It is the seat of a Roman Catholic archbishop and a Greek metropolitan, but in every respect has greatly declined from its former prosperity. The walls are dilapidated; plane-trees grow on the gigantic ruins of its old Byzantine citadel; and its harbour, once equally commodious and safe, is gradually becoming silted up. The only features worthy of notice are the quay, with its rows of cannon, and the bridge, 750 ft. long, which leads across the marshes stretching along the coast. The chief exports are olive oil--largely manufactured in the district--wheat, oats, barley, pottery and skins.

_Epidamnus_ was founded by a joint colony of Corcyreans and Corinthians towards the close of the 7th century B.C., and from its admirable position and the fertility of the surrounding country soon rose into very considerable importance. The dissolution of its original oligarchical government by the democratic opposition, the consequent quarrel between Corcyra and the oligarchical city of Corinth, and the intervention of Athens on behalf of Corcyra, are usually included among the contributory causes of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). In 312 B.C., Epidamnus was seized by the Illyrian king Glaucias, and shortly afterwards it passed into the power of the Romans. As the name Epidamnus sounded to Roman ears like an evil omen, as though it were derived from the Latin _damnum_, "loss" or "harm," the alternative name of _Dyrrachium_, which the city possibly received from the rugged nature of the adjoining sea-coast, came into general use. Thenceforward Epidamnus rose rapidly in importance. It was a favourite point of debarcation for the Roman armies; the great military road known as the _Via Egnatia_ led from Dyrrachium to Thessalonica (Salonica); and another highway passed southwards to Buthrotum and Ambracia. Broad swamps rendered the city almost impregnable, and in 48 B.C. it became famous as the place where Pompey made his last successful resistance to Caesar. After the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., Augustus made over Dyrrachium to a colony of his veterans; it became a _civitas libera_ and a great commercial emporium (for coins see Maier, _Numis. Zeitschr._, 1908). The summit of its prosperity was reached about the end of the 4th century, when it was made the capital of Epirus Nova. Its bishopric, created about A.D. 58, was raised to an archbishopric in 449. In 481 the city was besieged by Theodoric, the king of the East Goths; and in the 10th and 11th centuries it frequently had to defend itself against the Bulgarians. In 1082 it was stormed by the Norman Robert Guiscard, who in the previous year had defeated the Greeks under their emperor Alexius; and in 1185 it fell into the hands of King William of Sicily. Surrendered to Venice in 1202, it afterwards broke loose from the republic and in 1268 passed into the possession of Charles of Anjou. In 1273 it was laid in ruins by an earthquake, but it soon recovered from the disaster, and became an independent duchy under John, the grandson of Charles (1294-1304), and afterwards under Philip of Otranto. In 1333 it was annexed to Achaea, in 1336 to Servia, and in 1394 to Venice. The Turks obtained possession in 1501.

D'URBAN, SIR BENJAMIN (1777-1849), British general and colonial administrator, was born in 1777, and entered the British army in 1793. Promoted lieutenant and captain in 1794 he took part in that year in operations in Holland and Westphalia. In 1795 he served under Sir Ralph Abercromby in San Domingo. He went on half-pay in 1800, joining the Royal Military College, where he remained until 1805, when he went to Hanover with the force under Lord Cathcart. Returning to England he filled various staff offices, and in November 1807 went to Dublin as assistant-quartermaster-general, being transferred successively to Limerick and the Curragh. He joined the army in the Peninsula in 1808, and his marked abilities as a staff officer led to his selection by General (afterwards Viscount) Beresford as quartermaster-general in the reorganization of the Portuguese army. He served throughout the Peninsular War without once going on leave and took part in nine pitched battles and sieges, Busaco, Albuera, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, the Nivelle, the Nive and Toulouse. He was promoted major-general in the Portuguese army and colonel in the British army in 1813, and made a K.C.B. in 1815. He remained in Portugal until 1816, when he was summoned home to take up the posts of colonel of the royal staff corps and deputy quartermaster-general at the Horse Guards. In 1819 he became major-general and in 1837 lieutenant-general. From 1829 he was colonel of the 51st Foot.

Sir Benjamin began his career as colonial administrator in 1820 when he was made governor of Antigua. In 1824 he was transferred to Demerara and Essequibo, then in a disturbed condition owing to a rising among the slaves consequent on the emancipation movement in Great Britain. D'Urban's rule proved successful, and in 1831 he carried out the amalgamation of Berbice with the other counties, the whole forming the colony of British Guiana, of which D'Urban was first governor. The ability with which he had for nine years governed a community of which the white element was largely of Dutch origin led to his appointment as governor of Cape Colony. He assumed office in January 1834, and the four years during which he held that post were of great importance in the history of South Africa. They witnessed the abolition of slavery, the establishment of a legislative council and municipal councils in Cape Colony, the first great Kaffir war and the beginning of the Great Trek. The firmness and justice of his administration won the cordial support of the British and Dutch colonists. The greater part of 1835 was occupied in repelling an unprovoked invasion of the eastern borders of the colony by Xosa Kaffirs. To protect the inhabitants of the eastern province Sir Benjamin extended the boundary of the colony to the Kei river and erected military posts in the district, allowing the Xosa to remain under British supervision. Since his appointment to the Cape there had been a change of ministry in England, and Lord Glenelg had become secretary for the Colonies in the second Melbourne administration. Prejudiced against any extension of British authority and lending a ready ear to a small but influential party in South Africa, Glenelg adopted the view that the Kaffirs had been the victims of systematic injustice. In a momentous despatch dated the 26th of December 1835 he set forth his views and instructed Sir Benjamin D'Urban to give up the newly annexed territory. At the same time Sir Andries Stockenstrom, Bart. (1792-1864), was appointed lieutenant-governor for the eastern provinces of the colony to carry out the policy of the home government, in which the Kaffir chiefs were treated as being on terms of full equality with Europeans. D'Urban in vain warned Glenelg of the disastrous consequences of his decision, the beginning of the long course of vacillation which wrought great harm to South Africa. One result of the new policy was to recreate a state of insecurity, bordering on anarchy, in the eastern province, and this condition was one of the causes of the Great Trek of the Dutch farmers which began in 1836. In various despatches D'Urban justified his position, characterizing the Trek as due to "insecurity of life and property occasioned by the recent measures, inadequate compensation for the loss of the slaves, and despair of obtaining recompense for the ruinous losses by the Kaffir invasion." (See further SOUTH AFRICA: _History_, and CAPE COLONY: _History_.) But Glenelg was not to be convinced by any argument, however cogent, and in a despatch dated the 1st of May 1837 he informed Sir Benjamin that he had been relieved of office. D'Urban, however, remained governor until the arrival of his successor, Sir George Napier, in January 1838.

During his governorship Sir Benjamin endeavoured to help the British settlers at Port Natal, who in 1835 named their town D'Urban (now written Durban) in his honour, but his suggestion that the district should be occupied as a British possession was vetoed by Lord Glenelg. Though no longer in office D'Urban remained in South Africa until April 1846. In 1840 he was made a G.C.B., and in 1842 declined a high military appointment in India offered him by Sir Robert Peel. In January 1847 he took up the command of the troops in Canada, and was still in command at the time of his death at Montreal on the 25th of May 1849.

DURBAN, the principal seaport and largest city of Natal, South Africa, the harbour being known as Port Natal, in 29 deg. 52' 48" S. 31 deg. 42' 49" E. It is 6810 m. from London via Madeira and 7785 via Suez, 823 m. by water E.N.E. from Cape Town and 483 m. by rail S.S.E. of Johannesburg. Pop. (1904) 67,842, of whom 31,302 were whites, 15,631 Asiatics (chiefly British Indians), 18,929 natives and 1980 of mixed race. From its situation and the character of its buildings Durban is one of the finest cities in South Africa. The climate is generally hot and humid, but not unhealthy. Although nearly half the citizens are British, the large number of Indians engaged in every kind of work gives to Durban an oriental aspect possessed by no other town in South Africa. The town is built on the E. side of a bay (Durban Bay or Bay of Natal), the entrance to which is marked on the west by a bold cliff, the Bluff, whose summit is 195 ft. above the sea, and on the east by a low sandy spit called the Point. The city extends from the Point along the side of the bay and also for some distance along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and stretches inland to a range of low hills called the Berea.

The chief streets, Smith, West and Pine, are in the lower town, parallel to one another and to the bay. They contain the principal public buildings, warehouses and shops, the Berea being a residential quarter. Of the three streets mentioned, West Street, the central thoroughfare, is the busiest. In its centre are the public gardens, in which is a handsome block of buildings in the Renaissance style, built in 1906-1908 at a cost of over L300,000, containing the town hall, municipal offices, public library, museum and art gallery. The art gallery holds many pictures of the modern British school. Opposite the municipal buildings are the post and telegraph offices, a fine edifice (built 1881-1885) with a clock tower 164 ft. high. The post office formerly served as town hall. In Pine Street is the Central railway station and the spacious Market House. Among the churches St Cyprian's (Anglican), in Smith Street, has a handsome chancel. The Roman Catholic cathedral is a fine building in the Gothic style. The town possesses several parks, one, the Victoria Park, facing the Indian Ocean. This part of the town is laid out with pleasure grounds and esplanades. The botanic gardens, in the upper town, contain a very fine collection of flowering shrubs and semi-tropical trees. Above the gardens is the observatory. There is a fine statue of Queen Victoria by Hamo Thornycroft, R.A., in the public gardens, and a memorial to Vasco da Gama at the Point. There is an extensive system of electric trams. Another favourite means of conveyance is by rickshaw, the runners being Zulus. The town is governed by a municipality which owns the water and electric lighting supplies and the tramway system. The sanitary services are excellent. The main water-supply is the Umlaas river, which enters the ocean 10 m. S. of the port. The municipal valuation, which is based on capital value, was L9,494,400 in 1909, the rate, including water, being 2-1/2 d. in the L.

The entrance to the harbour was obstructed by a formidable sand bar, but as the result of dredging operations there is now a minimum depth of water at the opening of the channel into the bay of over 30 ft., with a maximum depth of over 33 ft. The width of the passage between the Bluff and the Point is 450 ft. From the foot of the Bluff a breakwater extends over 2000 ft. into the sea, and parallel to it, starting from the Point, is a pier. The harbour is landlocked, and covers 7-1/2 sq. m. Much of this area is shoal water, but the accommodation available was largely increased by the removal during 1904-1908 of 24,000,000 tons of sand. The port has over 3 m. of wharfage. It possesses a floating dock capable of lifting a vessel of 8500 tons, a floating workshop, a patent slip for small craft, hydraulic cranes, &c. The minimum depth alongside the quays at low water is 23 ft., increased at places to over 30 ft. The principal wharves, where passengers, mails and general merchandise are landed, are along the Point. On the opposite side at the foot of the Bluff land has been reclaimed and extensive accommodation provided for ships coaling. At Congella at the N.E. end of the harbour some 65 acres of land were reclaimed during 1905-1906, and wharves built for the handling of heavy and bulky goods such as timber and corrugated iron. Here also are situated warehouses and railway works. The port is defended by batteries armed with modern heavy guns. The trade of the port is almost coextensive with the foreign trade of Natal.

_History._--The early history of Durban is closely identified with that of the colony of Natal. The first permanent settlement by white men in the bay was made by Englishmen in 1824, when Lieutenant F.G. Farewell, R.N., and about ten companions went thither from Cape Town in the brig "Salisbury," from which circumstance the island in the bay gets its name. In 1835 a township was laid out and the colonists gave it the name of D'Urban, in honour of Sir Benjamin D'Urban, then governor of Cape Colony. At this time a mission church was built on the heights overlooking the bay by Captain Allen Gardner, R.N., who named the hill Berea in gratitude for support received from the settlers, whom he found "more noble than those of" Zululand--Dingaan having refused to allow the captain to start a mission among his people. From December 1838 to December 1839 a small British military force was stationed at the port. On its recall the little settlement was taken possession of by Dutch emigrants from the Cape, who had defeated the Zulu king Dingaan, and who the year before at the upper end of the bay had formed an encampment, _Kangela_ (look-out), the present Congella. The Dutch claimed independence, and on the block-house at Durban hoisted the flag of the "Republic of Natalia." In 1842, however, a British military force reoccupied Durban, and on the 15th of July of that year a treaty was signed in which the Dutch recognized British sovereignty (see further NATAL: _History_). From that date Durban, though not the seat of government, became the principal town in Natal. In 1850 there were 500 white inhabitants, and in 1853 the town was granted municipal government. The first mayor was Mr George Cato (c. 1810-1893), one of the earliest settlers in Natal. In 1860 a railway from the Point to the town, the first railway in South Africa, was opened. The discovery of the gold-mines on the Rand greatly increased the importance of the port, and renewed efforts were made to remove the bar which obstructed the entrance to the bay. The Harbour Board, which was formed in 1881 and ceased to exist in 1893, effected, under the guidance of Mr Harry Escombe, enormous improvements in the port--on which the prosperity of Durban is dependent. But it was not until 1904 that the fairway was deepened sufficiently to allow mail steamers of the largest class to enter the harbour. The growth of the port as illustrated by customs receipts is shown in the increase from L250,000 in 1880 to L981,000 in 1904. In 1846 the customs revenue was returned at L3510.

See _Durban: Fifty Years' Municipal History_, compiled for the
corporation by W.P.M. Henderson, Asst. Town Clerk (Durban, 1904); G.
Russell, _History of Old Durban_ [to 1860] (Durban, 1899).

DURBAR, a term in India for a court or levee, from the Persian _darbar_. A durbar may be either a council for administering affairs of state, or a purely ceremonial gathering. In the former sense the native rulers of India in the past, like the amir of Afghanistan to-day, received visitors and conducted business in durbar. A durbar is the executive council of a native state. In the latter sense the word has come to be applied to great ceremonial gatherings like Lord Lytton's durbar for the proclamation of the queen empress in India in 1877, or the Delhi durbar of 1903.

DUREN, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine province, on the right bank of the Roer, 19 m. E. from Aix-la-Chapelle on the main line of railway to Cologne. Pop. (1905) 29,270. It has two Protestant and six Roman Catholic churches, among the latter the Gothic St Annakirche, said to contain a portion of the head of the saint, to the shrine of which frequent pilgrimages are made. There are several high grade schools, monuments to the emperor William I., Bismarck and Moltke, and, in the town-hall, a collection of antiquities. It is the seat of considerable manufactures, notably cloth, paper, flax-spinning, carpet, artificial wool, sugar, iron wares and needles.

Duren derives its name, not, as was at one time believed, from the _Marcodurum_ of the Ubii, mentioned in Tacitus, but from the _Dura_ or _Duria_, assemblies held by the Carolingians in the 8th century. It received civic rights early in the 13th century. Hypothecated by the emperor Frederick II. to Count William of Julich, it became incorporated with the duchy of that name, and with it passed to Prussia in 1816.

DURENE (1.2.4.5 tetramethyl benzene) C6H2(CH3)4, a hydro-carbon which has been recognized as a constituent of coal-tar. It may be prepared by the action of methyl iodide on brom-pseudocumene or 4.6 dibrom metaxylene, in the presence of sodium; or by the action of methyl chloride on toluene, in the presence of anhydrous aluminium chloride. It crystallizes in plates, having a camphor-like smell, melting at 79-80 deg. C. and boiling at 189-191 deg. C. It is easily soluble in alcohol, ether and benzene, and sublimes slowly at ordinary temperature. On oxidation with chromic acid mixture, it is completely decomposed into carbon dioxide and acetic acid; nitric acid oxidizes it to durylic and cumidic acids [C6H2.(CH3)2.(COOH)2].

DURER, ALBRECHT (1471-1528), German painter, draughtsman and engraver, was born at Nuremberg on the 21st of May 1471. His family was not of Nuremberg descent, but came from the village of Eytas in Hungary. The name, however, is German, and the family device--an open door--points to an original form Thurer, meaning a maker of doors or carpenter. Albrecht Durer the elder was a goldsmith by trade, and settled soon after the middle of the 15th century in Nuremberg. He served as assistant under a master-goldsmith of the city, Hieronymus Holper, and in 1468 married his master's daughter Barbara, the bridegroom being forty and the bride fifteen years of age. They had eighteen children, of whom Albrecht was the second. The elder Durer was an esteemed craftsman and pious citizen, sometimes, as was natural, straitened in means by the pressure of his numerous progeny. His famous son writes with reverence and affection of both parents, and has left a touching narrative of their death-bed hours. He painted the portrait of his father twice, first in 1490, next in 1497. The former of these is in the Uffizi at Florence; of the latter, four versions exist, that in the National Gallery (formerly in the Ashburton-Northampton collections) having the best claim to originality.

The young Albrecht was his father's favourite son. "My father," he writes, "took special delight in me. Seeing that I was industrious in working and learning, he put me to school; and when I had learned to read and write, he took me home from school and taught me the goldsmith's trade." By and by the boy found himself drawn by preference from goldsmith's work to painting; his father, after some hesitation on the score of the time already spent in learning the former trade, gave way and apprenticed him for three years, at the age of fifteen and a half, to the principal painter of the town, Michael Wolgemut. Wolgemut furnishes a complete type of the German painter of that age. At the head of a large shop with many assistants, his business was to turn out, generally for a small price, devotional pieces commissioned by mercantile corporations or private persons to decorate their chapels in the churches--the preference being usually for scenes of the Passion, or for tortures and martyrdoms of the saints. In such work the painters of Upper Germany at this time, working in the spirit of the late Gothic style just before the dawn of the Renaissance, show considerable technical attainments, with a love of quaint costumes and rich draperies crumpled in complicated angular folds, some feeling for romance in landscape backgrounds, none at all for clearness or balance in composition, and in the attitudes and expressions of their overcrowded figures a degree of grotesqueness and exaggeration amounting often to undesigned caricature. There were also produced in the workshop of Wolgemut, as in that of other artist-craftsmen of his town, a great number of woodcuts for book illustration. We cannot with certainty identify any of these as being by the 'prentice hand of the young Durer. Authentic drawings done by him in boyhood, however, exist, including one in silver-point of his own likeness at the age of thirteen in the Albertina at Vienna, and others of two or three years later in the print room at Berlin, at the British Museum and at Bremen.

In the school of Wolgemut Durer learned much, by his own account, but suffered not a little from the roughness of his companions. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1490 he entered upon the usual course of travels--the _Wanderjahre_--of a German youth. Their direction we cannot retrace with certainty. There had been no one at Nuremberg skilled enough in the art of metal-engraving to teach it him to much purpose, and it had at one time been his father's intention to apprentice him to Martin Schongauer of Colmar, the most refined and accomplished German painter-engraver of his time. But after travelling two years in various parts of Germany, where we are unable to follow him, the young Durer arrived at Colmar in 1492, only to find that Schongauer had died the previous year. He was received kindly by three brothers of the deceased master established there, and afterwards, still in 1492, by a fourth brother at Basel. Under them he evidently had some practice both in metal-engraving and in furnishing designs for the woodcutter. There is in the museum at Basel a wood-block of St Jerome executed by him and elaborately signed on the back with his name. This was used in an edition of Jerome's letters printed in the same city in the same year, 1492. Some critics also maintain that his hand is to be recognized in several series of small blocks done about the same date or somewhat later for Bergmann and other printers of Basel, some of them being illustrations to Terence (which were never printed), some to the romance of the _Ritter vom Turm_, and some to the _Narrenschiff_ of Sebastian Brandt. But the prevailing opinion is against this conjecture, and sees in these designs the work not of a strenuous student and searcher such as Durer was, but of a riper and more facile hand working in a spirit of settled routine. Whether the young Durer's stay at Basel was long or short, or whether, as has been supposed, he travelled from there into the Low Countries, it is certain that in the early part of 1494 he was working at Strassburg, and returned to his home at Nuremberg immediately after Whitsuntide in that year. Of works certainly executed by him during his years of travel there are extant, besides the Basel wood-block, only a much-injured portrait of himself, very finely dressed and in the first bloom of his admirable manly beauty, dated 1493 and originally painted on vellum but since transferred to canvas (this is the portrait of the Felix Goldschmid collection); a miniature painting on vellum at Vienna (a small figure of the Child-Christ); and some half a dozen drawings, of which the most important are the characteristic pen portrait of himself at Erlangen, with a Holy Family on the reverse much in the manner of Schongauer; another Holy Family in nearly the same style at Berlin; a study from the female nude in the Bonnat collection; a man and woman on horseback in Berlin; a man on horseback, and an executioner about to behead a young man, at the British Museum, &c. These drawings all show Durer intent above all things on the sternly accurate delineation of ungeneralized individual forms by means of strongly accented outline and shadings curved, somewhat like the shadings of Martin Schongauer's engravings, so as to follow their modellings and roundness.

Within a few weeks of his return (July 7th, 1494) Durer was married, according to an arrangement apparently made between the parents during his absence, to Agnes Frey, the daughter of a well-to-do merchant of the city. By the autumn of the same year, probably feeling the incompleteness of the artistic training that could be obtained north of the Alps, he must have taken advantage of some opportunity, we know not what, to make an excursion of some months to Italy, leaving his lately married wife at Nuremberg. The evidences of this travel (which are really incontestable, though a small minority of critics still decline to admit them) consist of (1) some fine drawings, three of them dated 1494 and others undated, but plainly of the same time, in which Durer has copied, or rather boldly translated into his own Gothic and German style, two famous engravings by Mantegna, a number of the "Tarocchi" prints of single figures which pass erroneously under that master's name, and one by yet another minor master of the North-Italian school; with another drawing dated 1495 and plainly copied from a lost original by Antonio Pollaiuolo, and yet another of an infant Christ copied in 1495 from Lorenzo di Credi, from whom also Durer took a motive for the composition of one of his earliest Madonnas; (2) several landscape drawings done in the passes of Tirol and the Trentino, which technically will not fit in with any other period of his work, and furnish a clear record of his having crossed the Alps about this date; (3) two or three drawings of the costumes of Venetian courtesans, which he could not have made anywhere but in Venice itself, and one of which is used in his great woodcut Apocalypse series of 1498; (4) a general preoccupation which he shows for some years from this date with the problems of the female nude, treated in a manner for which Italy only could have set him the example; and (5) the clear implication contained in a letter written from Venice in 1506 that he had been there already eleven years before; when things, he says, pleased him much which at the time of writing please him no more. Some time in 1495 Durer must have returned from this first Italian journey to his home in Nuremberg, where he seems to have lived, without further change or removal, in the active practice of his art for the next ten years.

The hour when Durer, the typical artist of the German nation, attained maturity was one of the most pregnant in the history of his race. It was the crisis, in northern Europe, of the transition between the middle ages and our own. The awakening of Germany at the Renaissance was not, like the awakening of Italy a generation or two earlier, a movement almost exclusively intellectual. It was indeed from Italy that the races of the north caught the impulse of intellectual freedom, the spirit of science and curiosity, the eager retrospect towards the classic past; but joined with these in Germany was a moral impulse which was her own, a craving after truth and right, a rebellion against spiritual tyranny and corruption--the Renaissance was big in the north, as it was not in the south, with a Reformation to come. The art of printing had been invented in good time to help and hasten the new movement of men's minds. Nor was it by the diffusion of written ideas only that the new art supplied the means of popular enlightenment. Along with word-printing, or indeed in advance of it, there had sprung into use another kind of printing, picture-printing, or what is commonly called engraving. Just as books were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating ideas, so engravings on copper or wood were the means of multiplying, cheapening and disseminating images which gave vividness to the ideas, or served, for those ignorant of letters, in their stead. Technically one of these arts, that of line-engraving on copper, sprang from the craft of the goldsmith and metal-chaser; while that of wood-engraving sprang from the craft of the printers of pattern-blocks and playing cards. The engraver on metal habitually cut his own designs, and between the arts of the goldsmith and the painter there had always been a close alliance, both being habitually exercised by persons of the same family and sometimes by one and the same person; so that there was no lack of hands ready-trained for the new craft which required of the man who practised it that he should design like a painter and cut metal like a goldsmith. Designs intended to be cut on wood, on the other hand, were usually drawn by the artist on the block and handed over for cutting to a class of workmen--_Formschneider_ or _Briefmaler_--especially devoted to that industry. Both kinds of engraving soon came to be in great demand. Independently of the illustration of written or printed books, for which purpose woodcuts were almost exclusively used, separate engravings or sets of engravings in both kinds were produced, the more finely wrought and more expensive, appealing especially to the more educated classes, on copper, the bolder, simpler and cheaper on wood; and both kinds found a ready sale at all the markets, fairs and church festivals of the land. Subjects of popular devotion predominated. Figures of the Virgin and Child, of the apostles and evangelists, the fathers of the Church, the saints and martyrs, with illustrations of sacred history and the Apocalypse, were supplied in endless repetition to satisfy the cravings of a pious and simple-minded people. But to these were quickly added subjects of allegory, of classical learning, of witchcraft and superstition and of daily life; scenes of the parlour and the cloister, of the shop, the field, the market and the camp; and lastly portraits of famous men, with scenes of court life and princely pageant and ceremony. Thus the new art became a mirror of almost all the life and thoughts of the age. The genius of Albrecht Durer cannot be rightly estimated without taking into account the position which the arts of engraving on metal and on wood thus held in the culture of this time. He was indeed professionally and in the first place a painter; but throughout his career a great, and on the whole the most successful, part of his industry was devoted to drawing on the block for the woodcutter or engraving with his own hand on copper. The town of Nuremberg in Franconia, in the age of Durer's early manhood, was a favourable home for the growth and exercise of his powers. Of the free imperial cities of central Germany, none had a greater historic fame or a more settled and patriotic government. None was more the favourite of the emperors, nor the seat of a more active and flourishing commerce. Nuremberg was the chief mart for the merchandise that came to central Europe from the east through Venice and over the passes of Tirol. She held not only a close commercial intercourse, but also a close intellectual intercourse, with Italy. Without being so forward as the rival city of Augsburg to embrace the architectural fashions of the Italian renaissance--continuing, indeed, to be profoundly imbued with the old and homely German burgher spirit, and to wear, in a degree which time has not very much impaired even yet, the quaintness of the old German civic aspect--she had imported before the close of the 15th century a fair share of the new learning of Italy, and numbered among her citizens distinguished humanists like Hartmann Schedel, Sebald Schreier, Willibald Pirkheimer and Conrad Celtes. From associates like these Durer could imbibe the spirit of Renaissance culture and research; but the external aspects and artistic traditions which surrounded him were purely Gothic, and he had to work out for himself the style and form-language fit to express what was in him. During the first seven or eight years of his settled life in his native city from 1495, he betrays a conflict of artistic tendencies as well as no small sense of spiritual strain and strife. His finest work in this period was that which he provided for the woodcutter. After some half--dozen miscellaneous single prints--"Samson and the Lion," the "Annunciation," the "Ten Thousand Martyrs," the "Knight and Men-at-arms," the "Men's Bath," &c.--he undertook and by 1498 completed his famous series of sixteen great designs for the Apocalypse. The northern mind had long dwelt with eagerness on these phantasmagoric mysteries of things to come, and among the earliest block-books printed in Germany is an edition of the Apocalypse with rude figures. Founding himself to some extent on the traditional motives, Durer conceived and carried out a set of designs in which the qualities of the German late Gothic style, its rugged strength and restless vehemence, its love of gnarled forms, writhing actions and agitated lines, are fused by the fire of the young master's spirit into vital combination with something of the majestic power and classic severity which he had seen and admired in the works of Mantegna. Of a little later date, and of almost as fine a quality, are the first seven of a large series of woodcuts known as the Great Passion; and a little later again (probably after 1500), a series of eleven subjects of the Holy Family and of saints singly or in groups: then, towards 1504-1505, come the first seventeen of a set illustrating the life of the Virgin: neither these nor the Great Passion were published till several years later.

In copper-engraving Durer was at the same time diligently training himself to develop the methods practised by Martin Schongauer and earlier masters into one suitable for his own self-expression. He attempted no subjects at all commensurate with those of his great woodcuts, but contented himself for the most part with Madonnas, single figures of scripture or of the saints, some nude mythologies of a kind wholly new in northern art and founded upon the impressions received in Italy, and groups, sometimes bordering on the satirical, of humble folk and peasants. In the earliest of the Madonnas, the "Virgin with the Dragon-fly" (1495-1496), Durer has thrown something of his own rugged energy into a design of the traditional Schongauer type. In examples of a few years later, like the "Virgin with the Monkey," the design of Mother and Child clearly betrays the influence of Italy and specifically of Lorenzo di Credi. The subjects of the "Prodigal Son" and "St Jerome in the Wilderness" he on the other hand treats in an almost purely northern spirit. In the nudes of the next four or five years, which included a "St Sebastian," the so-called "Four Witches" (1497), the "Dream" or "Temptation," the "Rape of Amymome," and the "Jealousy" or "Great Hercules," Venetian, Paduan and Florentine memories are found, in the treatment of the human form, competing somewhat uncomfortably with his own inherited Gothic and northern instincts. In these early engravings the highly-wrought landscape backgrounds, whenever they occur, are generally the most satisfying feature. This feature reaches a climax of beauty and elaboration in the large print of "St Eustace and the Stag," while the figures and animals remain still somewhat cramped and immature. In the first three or four years of the 16th century, we find Durer in his graver-work still contending with the problems of the nude, but now with added power, though by methods which in different subjects contrast curiously with one another. Thus the "Nemesis," belonging probably to 1503, is a marvellously wrought piece of quite unflinching realism in the rendering of a common type of mature, muscular, unshapely German womanhood. The conception and attributes of the figure are taken, as has lately been recognized, from a description in the "Manto" of Politian: the goddess, to whose shoulders are appended a pair of huge wings, stands like Fortune on a revolving ball, holding the emblems of the cup and bridle, and below her feet is spread a rich landscape of hill and valley. In the "Adam and Eve" of the next year, we find Durer treating the human form in an entirely opposite manner; constructing it, that is, on principles of abstract geometrical proportion. The Venetian painter-etcher, Jacopo de Barbari, whom Durer had already, it would seem, met in Venice in 1494-1495, and by the example of whose engravings he had already been much influenced, came to settle for a while in Nuremberg in 1500. He was conversant to some extent with the new sciences of perspective, anatomy and proportion, which had been making their way for years past in Italy, and from him it is likely that Durer received the impulse to similar studies and speculations. At any rate a whole series of extant drawings enables us to trace the German gradually working out his own ideas of a canon of human proportion in the composition of his famous engraving of "Adam and Eve" (1504); which at first, as a drawing in the British Museum proves, had been intended to be an Apollo and Diana conceived on lines somewhat similar to one of Barbari's. The drama of the subject has in this instance not interested him at all, but only the forms and designs of the figures, the realization of the quality of flesh surfaces by the subtlest use of the graving-tool known to him, and the rendering, by methods of which he had become the greatest of all masters, of the richness and intricacy of the forest background. Two or three other technical masterpieces of the engraver's art, the "Coat-of-Arms with the Skull," the "Nativity," with its exquisite background of ruined buildings, the "Little Horse" and the "Great Horse," both of 1505, complete the list of the master's chief productions in this kind before he started in the last-named year for a second visit to Italy.

The pictures of this earlier Nuremberg period are not many in number and not very admirable. Durer's powers of hand and eye are already extraordinary and in their way almost unparalleled, but they are often applied to the too insistent, too glittering, too emphatic rendering of particular details and individual forms, without due regard to subordination or the harmony of the whole. Among the earliest seem to be two examples of a method practised in Italy especially by the school of Mantegna, but almost without precedent in Germany, that of tempera-painting on linen. One of these is the portrait of Frederick the Wise of Saxony, formerly in the Hamilton collection and now at Berlin; the second, much disfigured by restoration, is the Dresden altarpiece with a Madonna and Child in the middle and St Anthony and Sebastian in the wings. A mythology reminiscent of Italy is the "Hercules and the Stymphalian Birds" in the Germanic Museum at Nuremberg, founded directly upon the "Hercules and Centaur Nessus" of Pollaiuolo, now at New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A. Of portraits, besides that of his father already mentioned as done in 1497, there is his own of 1498 at Madrid. Two totally dissimilar portraits of young women, both existing in duplicate examples (one pair at Augsburg and Frankfort, the other pair in the collections of M. Hengel in Paris and Baron Speck von Sternburg at Lutzschema, for each of which has been claimed the name Furlegerin, that is, a member of the Furleger family at Nuremberg), belong to nearly the same time. Other panel portraits of the period are three small ones of members of the Tucher family at Weimar and Cassel, and the striking, restlessly elaborated half-length of Oswald Krell at Munich. In some devotional pictures of the time Durer seems to have been much helped by pupils, as in the two different compositions of the Maries weeping over the body of Christ preserved respectively at Munich and Nuremberg. In an altarpiece at Ober St Veit and in the scattered wings of the Jabach altarpiece severally preserved at Munich, Frankfort and Cologne, the workmanship seems to be exclusively that of journeymen working from his drawings. The period is closed, so far as paintings are concerned, by two examples of far higher value than those above named, that is to say the Paumgartner altarpiece at Munich, with its romantically attractive composition of the Nativity with angels and donors in the central panel, and the fine armed figures of St George and St Eustace (lately freed from the over-paintings which disfigured them) on the wings; and the happily conceived and harmoniously finished "Adoration of the Magi" in the Uffizi at Florence.

In the autumn of 1505 Durer journeyed for a second time to Venice, and stayed there until the spring of 1507. The occasion of this journey has been erroneously stated by Vasari. Durer's engravings, both on copper and wood, had by this time attained great popularity both north and south of the Alps, and had begun to be copied by various hands, among others by the celebrated Marcantonio of Bologna, then in his youth. According to Vasari, Marcantonio, in copying Durer's series of the Little Passion on wood, had imitated the original monogram, and Durer, indignant at this fraud, set out for Italy in order to protect his rights, and having lodged a complaint against Marcantonio before the signory of Venice, carried his point so far that Marcantonio was forbidden in future to add the monogram of Durer to copies taken after his works. This account will not bear examination. Chronological and other proofs show that if such a suit was fought at all, it must have been in connexion with another set of Durer's woodcuts, the first seventeen of the Life of the Virgin. Durer himself, a number of whose familiar letters written from Venice to his friend Pirkheimer at Nuremberg are preserved, makes no mention of anything of the kind. Nevertheless some such grievance may possibly have been among the causes which determined his journey. Other causes, of which we have explicit record, were an outbreak of sickness at Nuremberg; Durer's desire, which in fact was realized, of finding a good market for the proceeds of his art; and the prospect, also realized, of a commission for an important picture from the German community settled at Venice, who had lately caused an exchange and warehouse--the _Fondaco de' Tedeschi_--to be built on the Grand Canal, and who were now desirous to dedicate a picture in the church of St Bartholomew. The picture painted by Durer on this commission was the "Adoration of the Virgin," better known as the "Feast of Rose Garlands"; it was subsequently acquired by the emperor Rudolf II., and carried as a thing beyond price upon men's shoulders to Vienna; it now exists in a greatly injured state in the monastery of Strahow at Prague. It shows the pope and emperor, with a lute-playing angel between them, kneeling to right and left of the enthroned Virgin and Child, who crown them with rose garlands, with a multitude of other kneeling saints disposed with free symmetry in the background, and farther in the background portraits of the donor and the painter, and a flutter of wreath-carrying cherubs in the air. Of all Durer's works, it is the one in which he most deliberately rivalled the combined splendour and playfulness of certain phases of Italian art. The Venetian painters assured him, he says, that they had never seen finer colours. They were doubtless too courteous to add that fine colours do not make fine colouring. Even in its present ruined state, it is apparent that in spite of the masterly treatment of particular passages, such as the robe of the pope, Durer still lacked a true sense of harmony and tone-relations, and that the effect of his work must have been restless and garish beside that of a master like the aged Bellini. That veteran showed the German visitor the most generous courtesy, and Durer still speaks of him as the best in painting ("_der pest im gemell_") in spite of his advanced years. A similar festal intention in design and colouring, with similar mastery in passages and even less sense of harmonious relations in the whole, is apparent in a second important picture painted by Durer at Venice, "The Virgin and Child with the Goldfinch," formerly in the collection of Lord Lothian and now at Berlin. A "Christ disputing with the Doctors" of the same period, in the Barberini Gallery at Rome, is recorded to have cost the painter only five days' labour, and is an unsatisfying and ill-composed congeries of heads and hands, both of such strenuous character and individuality as here and there to pass into caricature. The most satisfying of Durer's paintings done in Venice are the admirable portrait of a young man at Hampton Court (the same sitter reappears in the "Feast of Rose Garlands"), and two small pieces, one the head of a brown Italian girl modelled and painted with real breadth and simplicity, formerly in the collection of Mr Reginald Cholmondeley and now at Berlin, and the small and very striking little "Christ Crucified" with the figure relieved against the night sky, which is preserved in the Dresden Gallery and has served as model and inspiration to numberless later treatments of the theme. An interesting, rather fantastic, portrait of a blonde girl wearing a wide cap, now in the Berlin museum, is dated 1507 and may have been done in the early months of that year at Venice. It is possible, though not certain, that to this date also belongs the famous portrait of himself at Munich bearing a false signature and date, 1500; in this it has been lately shown that the artist modified his own lineaments according to a preconceived scheme of facial proportion, so that it must be taken as an ideal rather than a literal presentment of himself to posterity as he appeared in the flower of his early middle age. From Venice Durer kept up a continuous correspondence, which has been published, with his bosom friend Pirkheimer at Nuremberg. He tells of the high position he holds among the Venetians; of the jealousy shown him by some of the meaner sort of native artist; of the honour and wealth in which he might live if he would consent to abandon home for Italy; of the northern winter, and how he knows that after his return it will set him shivering for the south. Yet he resisted all seductions and was in Nuremberg again before the summer of 1507. First, it seems, he had made an excursion to Bologna, having intended to take Mantua on the way, in order to do homage to the old age of that Italian master, Andrea Mantegna, from whose work he had himself in youth learned the most. But the death of Mantegna prevented his purpose.

From the spring of 1507 until the summer of 1520, Durer was again a settled resident in his native town. Except the brilliant existences of Raphael at Rome and of Rubens at Antwerp and Madrid, the annals of art present the spectacle of few more honoured or more fortunate careers. His reputation had spread all over Europe. From Flanders to Rome his distinction was acknowledged, and artists of less invention, among them some of the foremost on both sides of the Alps, were not ashamed to borrow from his work this or that striking combination or expressive type. He was on terms of friendship or friendly communication with all the first masters of the age, and Raphael held himself honoured in exchanging drawings with Durer. In his own country, all orders of men, from the emperor Maximilian down, delighted to honour him; and he was the familiar companion of chosen spirits among the statesmen, humanists and reformers of the new age. The burgher life of even Nuremberg, the noblest German city, seems narrow, quaint and harsh beside the grace and opulence and poetical surroundings of Italian life in the same and the preceding generation. The great cities of Flanders also, with their world-wide commerce and long-established eminence in the arts, presented aspects of more splendid civic pomp and luxury. But among its native surroundings the career of Durer stands out with an aspect of ideal elevation and decorum which is its own. His temper and life seem to have been remarkably free from all that was jarring, jealous and fretful; unless, indeed, we are to accept as true the account of his wife's character which represents her as having been no fit mate for him, but an incorrigible shrew and skinflint. The name of Agnes Durer was for centuries used to point a moral, and among the unworthy wives of great men the wife of Durer became almost as notorious as the wife of Socrates. The source of the traditions to her discredit is to be found in a letter written a few years after Durer's death by his life-long intimate, Willibald Pirkheimer, who accuses her of having plagued her husband to death by her meanness, made him overwork himself for money's sake, and given his latter days no peace. No doubt there must have been some kind of foundation for Pirkheimer's charges; and it is to be noted that neither in Durer's early correspondence with this intimate friend, nor anywhere in his journals, does he use any expressions of tenderness or affection for his wife, only speaking of her as his housemate and of her helping in the sale of his prints, &c. That he took her with him on his journey to the Netherlands shows at any rate that there can have been no acute estrangement. And it is fair to remember in her defence that Pirkheimer when he denounced her was old, gouty and peevish, and that the immediate occasion of his outbreak against his friend's widow was a fit of anger because she had not let him have a pair of antlers--a household ornament much prized in those days--to which he fancied himself entitled out of the property left by Durer. We have evidence that after her husband's death Agnes Durer behaved with generosity to his brothers.