Sweden. This invitation, and another of a similar character, he declined, in order to attend the duke de la Force as chaplain; and in this position he remained eight years. At the Restoration he returned to England, and engaged in the arduous work of establishing the new episcopal French church at the Savoy, London, where he preached for a number of years with great acceptability. In 1663 he obtained a prebendal stall in the cathedral of Salisbury, and the following year a canonry of Windsor. Honours and preferments rapidly followed. The fourth prebend of Durham, the deanery of Windsor, and the living of Witney were successively bestowed upon him; and in 1669-70 he was created D.D. by the university of Oxford, the chancellor warmly commending the new doctor's loyalty, fidelity, and services to the king. It is probable, as Anthony Wood affirms, that if Durel had lived a few years longer he would have been raised to a bishopric. He died in 1683. Durel's learning was respectable; it was wholly devoted to the defence of episcopacy, which in his time had many learned and acrimonious assailants. Although commended for his civility by one of his opponents, Du Moulin, Durel was not deficient in acrimony. He attacked the puritans with their own weapons; answering contempt with scorn, in a way which provoked on the side of these opponents a very different estimate of his disposition from that formed by Du Moulin. A list of his works will be found in the Biog. Brit.—J. S., G.
DURER (Dürer) Albrecht, the greatest genius in art of German origin, was at the same time a painter, an engraver, an architect, and a sculptor. Descended from a Hungarian family of Eytas, near Jula, he was born at Nuremberg in 1471, and was the third son of a family of eighteen. His father being a goldsmith, and as such, in those times, intimately connected with art, had watched with anxious attention the progressive development of the child that was to become the pet and stay of the family. He had with more than paternal affection guided the unsteady hand of the future great master, until it could trace by itself the wished-for-line; then, with praiseworthy self-denial, he is said to have put Albrecht under Martin Schön at Colmar, as better able to give him tuition; and ultimately he so well supported and fostered, with that aid which only a father can give, every small attempt on the part of the young man, that the latter, although not quite inclined for the limited paternal career, succeeded, when only sixteen, in completing his far-famed silver "Via Crucis." But, in the very triumph of this work, however satisfactory and sweet to his heart, Albrecht's father was obliged to read that his son was not destined to remain a goldsmith for life. It was sad to part from such a son, but art willed it; and Albrecht was sent to Michel Wohlgeumth to be made a painter. After little more than three years of hard and assiduous work, and in spite of the constant annoyances from his school-fellows, Dürer came out from Michel's studio a complete artist, ready to start into the wide world and try his fortunes in the highest branches of his profession. It was then that he travelled through Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, painting portraits and other pictures at various places on his route, which were greatly admired. On his return home in 1494, his father introduced him to the society of a neighbour's daughter, who very shortly after became the painter's wife. It was an ill-starred union, for Agnes Dürer was as remarkable for the shrewishness of her temper as the loveliness of her person. While Dürer—himself as fine a specimen of his race as can be imagined; of a commanding figure, noble, courteous in manners; his fine blue eye harmonizing with the rich, fair hair; his language and voice equally sweet—possessed a mild, gentle character; a delicate and almost morbid sensibility; his spouse was covetous, mean, restless, haughty, and violent, in a degree seldom witnessed, and certainly seldom brooked with any measure of patience. She allowed her husband no rest from work; his kind qualities she had made use of to make him her slave; in short, she became the bane of his life. Yet no spirit of revenge or impatience rose in Dürer's heart. He suffered in silence. But he who wants to fathom what effect such companionship was working upon his mind, must inspect the engraving of the allegory of "Melancholy," which he at that time produced. One would rather call it despair, although the artist strives to avoid in it the expression of his inward bitterness. Art was his great comforter; but he had also some solace in the sympathy of a real friend, Willibald Pirkheimer, who having married not a woman, but an angel, was a competent judge of the happiness which was denied to Albrecht. A short relief from the thraldom of his home was allowed to Dürer in 1506, when he revisited Venice alone. During his stay of eight months in that city, and his short trips to Bologna and other towns of North Italy, he had occasion to show his engravings, both on copper and on wood, to his future piratical imitator. Marc Antonio Raimondi, and to exchange tokens of esteem with no less a man than Raphael himself. Lanzi returned his own portrait for that of Dürer, which the latter had sent him, together with drawings and engravings. No more can be said than they were both worthy of each other's regard; and the candour of their intercourse ought to be an example to the artists of all ages. Of the fac-similes of thirty-seven subjects from Dürer's life and passion of Christ, which Raimondi executed, we shall speak when treating of him. Suffice it to say that all the skill and ingenuity of the first engraver of Italy was here required to imitate the work of the German artist; and that, although as intended copies, they almost defy discovery, yet to this only is their merit limited; whilst to Dürer alone, besides the beauty and originality of the method in the execution, all credit for composition and design is entirely due. Yet when afterwards the poor German artist applied to the Venitian tribunals for compensation for the wrong done him, the only verdict he could obtain was an order upon Marcantonio, prohibiting him from making any further use of Dürer's mark. Reverting to the stay of our artist at Venice during 1506, we must here add how his house had become a centre of attraction for all whose esteem was worth having; how, amongst the crowds of admirers that flocked to him, the German artist had the happiness of meeting and becoming intimately attached to a kindred artist the already old honest Gian Bellini; how another painter, equally worthy of such a friendship, claimed it; and how Dürer, in answer to the kind offer, was on his way to Mantua to meet that brother in art, when he heard that death had removed him from the strife of the world—that Andrea Mantegna was no more. Thus was his visit to Italy brought to an end. On his return to Germany, he was compelled to go to the Netherlands, and his wife accompanied him. From thence he was recalled in 1524 by the Emperor Maximilian, who highly esteemed him, and by whom he was raised to the nobility of the empire. Charles V. and Ferdinand of Bohemia continued him the same favour. All these princes were greatly fond of him, and interested by his conversation. Versed as he was in mathematics, as well as in architecture, it is reported that Dürer proved of great benefit to those monarchs by his advices on the subject of fortifications and artillery. It is also related that, on some occasion in which Dürer was painting so large a subject as to require steps to reach it, Maximilian, then present, requested a nobleman of his suite to steady it for the artist. This, of course, the nobleman declined to do; seeing which the emperor himself attended the painter, and turning round to his ill-advised courtier, thus apostrophized him—"Sir, understand that I can make Albrecht a noble like and above you; but neither I nor any one else on earth can make an artist like him." It is said that it was on that occasion, that Dürer was knighted. It must not be supposed that the success and the honours which Dürer had attained, had the least effect in soothing the temper of his pretty wife.. As remarked above, she was now following her husband everywhere he went; and as the returns for his works were not always commensurate to the labour they entailed (especially when it was employed by princes, kings, and emperors), she took it into her head to fear something like starvation, and on this score would allow the overtasked artist no moment of rest. Dürer was in the meanwhile striving to improve himself. During his stay in the Netherlands his style underwent a great change. Instead of the petty details, often very superfluous, of his earlier works, he now introduced the far more telling simplicity and harmony of conception, which is so strikingly shown in "the Apostles," now at Munich. But the misery of his domestic circumstances reached its climax. His house, his studio—where should have reigned that peace and quiet so dear and so necessary to artists, and where the poetic influences of love should have surrounded the overworked victim—was instead the scene in which ill-humour, defiance, and anger, were constantly let loose. His insane spouse, tormented by her avaricious apprehensions, kept constant watch on him and his work, embittering every minute with the reitera-
