’Mon ami, if you seriously prefer ice-cream and trifle to venison and dindon aux truffes, choose.  If either one of the four poets—­I do not include Rogers among poets—­ever conceived in his mind, and then produced on paper, a work, composed from his memory, of things terrible in nature, more sublime than Dante’s Inferno, I will grant you that he had esprit and imagination; otherwise, not.  It is of the English as a nation, however, that I make my broad and sweeping assertion, one that was fixed in my mind yesterday, when I saw a well-dressed and well-educated Englishman deliberately pick up a stone, knock off the head of a figure carved on a sarcophagus, found in one of those newly-discovered tombs on the Via Latina, and put the broken head in his pocket....  What man, with one grain of esprit or imagination in his head, would mutilate a work of ancient art, solely that he might possess a piece of stone, when memory had already placed the entire work forever in his mind. Basta! enough.  Look at the effect of the sunlight on the Albanian mountains.  How proudly Mount Gennaro towers over the desolate Campagna!  Hallo!  Von Bluhmen down there is in trouble.  Come along.’

Throwing down his umbrella, under which he had been sitting in the shade, Rocjean grasped the iron-pointed shaft, into which the handle of the umbrella fitted, and, accompanied by Caper, rushed to the rescue of the German.  It was none too soon.  While sketching, a shepherd, with a very large flock of sheep, had gradually approached nearer and nearer the spot where the artist was sitting at his task; his dogs, eight or ten in number, fierce, shaggy, white and black beasts, with slouching gait and pointed ears and noses, followed near him.  As Von Bluhmen paid no attention to them, the shepherd had wandered off; but one or two of his dogs hung back, and the artist, dropping a pencil, suddenly stooped to pick it up, when one of the savage creatures, thinking or ‘instincting’ that a stone was coming at him, rushed in, with loud barking, to make mince-meat of the German noble.  He seized his camp-stool, and kept the dog at bay; but in a moment the whole pack were down on him.  Just at this instant, in rushed Rocjean, staff in hand, beating the beasts right and left, and shouting to the shepherd, who was but a short distance off, to call off his dogs.  But the pecorajo, evidently a cross-grained fellow, only blackguarded the artists, until Rocjean, whose blood was up, swore if he did not call them off, he would shoot them, pulling a revolver from his pocket and aiming at the most savage dog as he spoke.  The shepherd only blackguarded him the more, and, just as the dog grabbed him by the pantaloons, Rocjean pulled the trigger, and with foaming jaws and blood pouring from his mouth, the dog fell dead at his feet.  The shot scared the other dogs, who fled, tails under.  The shepherd ran for the entrance of a cave, and came out in a minute with a single-barreled gun:  coming down to within twenty feet of Rocjean, he cocked it, and taking aim, screamed out:  ’Give me ten scudi for that dog, or I fire.’