in fees, viz. those on passports and the few invoices of goods sent to America, with such notarial business as might arise.  The late consul had resigned, and gone home to fight for the Confederate cause, leaving the consulate in the hands of a French secretary, an old and needy teacher of his native language whenever he could find a pupil.  He was satisfied with the pittance my own means allowed me to give him, and he wrote, in a much better French than mine would have been, the dispatches to the Vatican.  I could talk French fluently if not correctly, and that sufficed.  Before leaving Washington, I had received a hint from a friend in the Department of State that the fewer dispatches I troubled them with the higher would be my favor in the department, so that, with the exception of my quarterly accounts, I had little official writing to do; but when I came to Rome again in 1882, I was told by my successor of that date that my file of dispatches to the department was the only one which existed in the consular archives of the Papal occupation of Rome.

Rome was in those days the Lotophagitis of our century, whose population lived in an artificial peace, a sort of dreamland—­artists who, whether German, French, English, Americans, or Russians, were more or less imbued with the feeling of the old art, and who found their clientele in people who believed, as I have heard some say, that any picture painted in Rome was better than any picture painted elsewhere!  There was, therefore, a continual exportation of copies, good and bad, of the old masters and a few landscapes for the remembering of localities, but the quality of the art was of trifling importance to the buyers—­it was “done in Rome,” and that sufficed as merit.  The Cafe Greco, haunt of the race of artists since Salvator Rosa, was in its original and charming, if rude, simplicity, and there came all the artists to take their after-dinner cup.  Old John Gibson, though not the oldest of the habitues, was the chief of our Anglo-American community; Randolph Rogers, Mosier, Reinhart, Story, and two or three other sculptors, whose names I have forgotten, and two or three American landscape painters, of whom Tilton was chief at the time of my arrival, had the monopoly of American patronage, and every wealthy American who came conceived it his duty to patronize American art, while our government had the tradition of always sending an artist to Rome as consul.

Charlotte Cushman, a famous actress of her day, was the nucleus of a little clique of women sculptors, Miss Stebbins, Harriet Hosmer, and one or two others of lesser fame.  Accordingly, she made war on sculptors of the other sex in all the curious ways of womanly malice, in order to the exclusive reaping by her protegees of the golden harvest.  I had known her years before, when she was still on the stage and I the dramatic and art critic of the New York “Evening Post,” and, as our relations had then been cordial,