shadow, gleamed certain dim sculptures which I wonderingly approached.  One of the images, on the left of the palace door, was a magnificent colossus, shining through the dusky air like a sentinel who has taken the alarm.  In a moment I recognised him as Michael Angelo’s David.  I turned with a certain relief from his sinister strength to a slender figure in bronze, stationed beneath the high light loggia, which opposes the free and elegant span of its arches to the dead masonry of the palace; a figure supremely shapely and graceful; gentle, almost, in spite of his holding out with his light nervous arm the snaky head of the slaughtered Gorgon.  His name is Perseus, and you may read his story, not in the Greek mythology, but in the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini.  Glancing from one of these fine fellows to the other, I probably uttered some irrepressible commonplace of praise, for, as if provoked by my voice, a man rose from the steps of the loggia, where he had been sitting in the shadow, and addressed me in good English—­a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval birretta.  In a tone of the most insinuating deference he asked me for my “impressions.”  He seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal.  Hovering there in this consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of aesthetic hospitality—­if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico pocket-handkerchief and openly resentful of the divided franc.  This analogy was made none the less complete by the brilliant tirade with which he greeted my embarrassed silence.

“I have known Florence long, sir, but I have never known her so lovely as tonight.  It’s as if the ghosts of her past were abroad in the empty streets.  The present is sleeping; the past hovers about us like a dream made visible.  Fancy the old Florentines strolling up in couples to pass judgment on the last performance of Michael, of Benvenuto!  We should come in for a precious lesson if we might overhear what they say.  The plainest burgher of them, in his cap and gown, had a taste in the matter!  That was the prime of art, sir.  The sun stood high in heaven, and his broad and equal blaze made the darkest places bright and the dullest eyes clear.  We live in the evening of time!  We grope in the gray dusk, carrying each our poor little taper of selfish and painful wisdom, holding it up to the great models and to the dim idea, and seeing nothing but overwhelming greatness and dimness.  The days of illumination are gone!  But do you know I fancy—­I fancy”—­and he grew suddenly almost familiar in this visionary fervour—­“I fancy the light of that time rests upon us here for an hour!  I have never seen the David so grand, the Perseus so fair!  Even the inferior productions of John of Bologna and of Baccio Bandinelli seem to