Going down once towards Italy I saw a young man in the train whom I recognized, only he seemed to have got younger.  He was with a friend, and his face was in continual play, but for some little time I puzzled in vain to recollect where it was that I had seen him before.  All of a sudden I remembered he was King Francis I of France.  I had hitherto thought the face of this king impossible, but when I saw it in play I understood it.  His great contemporary Henry VIII keeps a restaurant in Oxford Street.  Falstaff drove one of the St. Gothard diligences for many years, and only retired when the railway was opened.  Titian once made me a pair of boots at Vicenza, and not very good ones.  At Modena I had my hair cut by a young man whom I perceived to be Raffaelle.  The model who sat to him for his celebrated Madonnas is first lady in a confectionery establishment at Montreal.  She has a little motherly pimple on the left side of her nose that is misleading at first, but on examination she is readily recognized; probably Raffaelle’s model had the pimple too, but Raffaelle left it out—­as he would.

Handel, of course, is Madame Patey.  Give Madame Patey Handel’s wig and clothes, and there would be no telling her from Handel.  It is not only that the features and the shape of the head are the same, but there is a certain imperiousness of expression and attitude about Handel which he hardly attempts to conceal in Madame Patey.  It is a curious coincidence that he should continue to be such an incomparable renderer of his own music.  Pope Julius ii was the late Mr. Darwin.  Rameses ii is a blind woman now, and stands in Holborn, holding a tin mug.  I never could understand why I always found myself humming “They oppressed them with burthens” when I passed her, till one day I was looking in Mr. Spooner’s window in the Strand, and saw a photograph of Rameses ii.  Mary Queen of Scots wears surgical boots and is subject to fits, near the Horse Shoe in Tottenham Court Road.

Michael Angelo is a commissionaire; I saw him on board the Glen Rosa, which used to run every day from London to Clacton-on-Sea and back.  It gave me quite a turn when I saw him coming down the stairs from the upper deck, with his bronzed face, flattened nose, and with the familiar bar upon his forehead.  I never liked Michael Angelo, and never shall, but I am afraid of him, and was near trying to hide when I saw him coming towards me.  He had not got his commissionaire’s uniform on, and I did not know he was one till I met him a month or so later in the Strand.  When we got to Blackwall the music struck up and people began to dance.  I never saw a man dance so much in my life.  He did not miss a dance all the way to Clacton, nor all the way back again, and when not dancing he was flirting and cracking jokes.  I could hardly believe my eyes when I reflected that this man had painted the famous “Last Judgment,” and had made all those statues.