varnish.  Old gentlemen then visited the sights in the morning, and quoted Horace to each other, and in the evening endeavoured by associating with Romans to understand something of Rome; young gentlemen now spend one or two mornings in finding fault with the architecture of Bramante, and “in the evening,” like David’s enemies, “they grin like a dog and run about the city:”  young women were content to find much beauty in the galleries and in the museums, and were simple enough to admire what they liked; young ladies of the present day can find nothing to admire except their own perspicacity in detecting faults in Raphael’s drawing or Michael Angelo’s colouring.  This is the age of incompetent criticism in matters artistic, and no one is too ignorant to volunteer an opinion.  It is sufficient to have visited half-a-dozen Italian towns, and to have read a few pages of fashionable aesthetic literature—­no other education is needed to fit the intelligent young critic for his easy task.  The art of paradox can be learned in five minutes, and practised by any child; it consists chiefly in taking two expressions of opinion from different authors, halving them, and uniting the first half of the one with the second half of the other.  The result is invariably startling, and generally incomprehensible.  When a young society critic knows how to be startling and incomprehensible, his reputation is soon made, for people readily believe that what they cannot understand is profound, and anything which astonishes is agreeable to a taste deadened by a surfeit of spices.  But in 1865 the taste of Europe was in a very different state.  The Second Empire was in its glory.  M. Emile Zola had not written his ‘Assommoir.’  Count Bismarck had only just brought to a successful termination the first part of his trimachy; Sadowa and Sedan were yet unfought.  Garibaldi had won Naples, and Cavour had said, “If we did for ourselves what we are doing for Italy, we should be great scoundrels;” but Garibaldi had not yet failed at Mentana, nor had Austria ceded Venice.  Cardinal Antonelli had yet ten years of life before him in which to maintain his gallant struggle for the remnant of the temporal power; Pius IX. was to live thirteen years longer, just long enough to outlive by one month the “honest king,” Victor Emmanuel.  Antonelli’s influence pervaded Rome, and to a great extent all the Catholic Courts of Europe; yet he was far from popular with the Romans.  The Jesuits, however, were even less popular than he, and certainly received a much larger share of abuse.  For the Romans love faction more than party, and understand it better; so that popular opinion is too frequently represented by a transitory frenzy, violent and pestilent while it lasts, utterly insignificant when it has spent its fury.