was a sort of Pitti Palace au petit pied.  She possessed “early masters” by the dozen—­a cluster of Peruginos in her dining-room, a Giotto in her boudoir, an Andrea del Sarto over her drawing-room chimney-piece.  Surrounded by these treasures, and by innumerable bronzes, mosaics, majolica dishes, and little worm-eaten diptychs covered with angular saints on gilded backgrounds, our hostess enjoyed the dignity of a sort of high-priestess of the arts.  She always wore on her bosom a huge miniature copy of the Madonna della Seggiola.  Gaining her ear quietly one evening, I asked her whether she knew that remarkable man, Mr. Theobald.

“Know him!” she exclaimed; “know poor Theobald!  All Florence knows him, his flame-coloured locks, his black velvet coat, his interminable harangues on the beautiful, and his wondrous Madonna that mortal eye has never seen, and that mortal patience has quite given up expecting.”

“Really,” I cried, “you don’t believe in his Madonna?”

“My dear ingenuous youth,” rejoined my shrewd friend, “has he made a convert of you?  Well, we all believed in him once; he came down upon Florence and took the town by storm.  Another Raphael, at the very least, had been born among men, and the poor dear United States were to have the credit of him.  Hadn’t he the very hair of Raphael flowing down on his shoulders?  The hair, alas, but not the head!  We swallowed him whole, however; we hung upon his lips and proclaimed his genius on the house-tops.  The women were all dying to sit to him for their portraits and be made immortal, like Leonardo’s Joconde.  We decided that his manner was a good deal like Leonardo’s—­mysterious, and inscrutable, and fascinating.  Mysterious it certainly was; mystery was the beginning and the end of it.  The months passed by, and the miracle hung fire; our master never produced his masterpiece.  He passed hours in the galleries and churches, posturing, musing, and gazing; he talked more than ever about the beautiful, but he never put brush to canvas.  We had all subscribed, as it were, to the great performance; but as it never came off people began to ask for their money again.  I was one of the last of the faithful; I carried devotion so far as to sit to him for my head.  If you could have seen the horrible creature he made of me, you would admit that even a woman with no more vanity than will tie her bonnet straight must have cooled off then.  The man didn’t know the very alphabet of drawing!  His strong point, he intimated, was his sentiment; but is it a consolation, when one has been painted a fright, to know it has been done with peculiar gusto?  One by one, I confess, we fell away from the faith, and Mr. Theobald didn’t lift his little finger to preserve us.  At the first hint that we were tired of waiting, and that we should like the show to begin, he was off in a huff.  ’Great work requires time, contemplation, privacy, mystery!  O ye of little