DA VINCI’S DISCRIMINATION.

Lionardo da Vinci possessed the rare faculty of being able to ascertain the just medium between hasty and labored work; and though very minute in the finishing of his pictures, yet he painted in a free and unrestrained style. The same master who consumed four years on the portrait of Mona Lisa Giocondo, gave one of the earliest and best lessons to the age, in the great style, in his memorable painting of the Last Supper. This power of attending at the same moment to the minutiæ of detail, and to the grand and leading principles of the art or science in which a person may be employed, shows a species of universality of power that may be reckoned among the highest perfections of the human mind; and it places Da Vinci not merely in the rank of the first of painters, but of the greatest of men.