“And this is your first visit to these enchanted halls?” he cried.  “Happy, thrice happy youth!” And taking me by the arm, he prepared to lead me to each of the pre-eminent works in turn and show me the cream of the gallery.  But before we left the Mantegna he pressed my arm and gave it a loving look. “He was not in a hurry,” he murmured.  “He knew nothing of ‘raw Haste, half-sister to Delay!’” How sound a critic my friend was I am unable to say, but he was an extremely amusing one; overflowing with opinions, theories, and sympathies, with disquisition and gossip and anecdote.  He was a shade too sentimental for my own sympathies, and I fancied he was rather too fond of superfine discriminations and of discovering subtle intentions in shallow places.  At moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics, and floundered a while in waters too deep for intellectual security.  But his abounding knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity.  “There are two moods,” I remember his saying, “in which we may walk through galleries—­the critical and the ideal.  They seize us at their pleasure, and we can never tell which is to take its turn.  The critical mood, oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending.  It relishes the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar cleverness, its conscious graces.  It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as if, according to his light, the painter had enjoyed doing it—­for the little Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled, pastoral, sceptical Italian landscapes.  Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious longing—­solemn church feasts of the intellect—­when all vulgar effort and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best—­the best of the best—­disgusts.  In these hours we are relentless aristocrats of taste.  We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not swallow Raphael whole!”

The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, but peculiarly fortunate in that fine architectural accident, as one may call it, which unites it—­with the breadth of river and city between them—­to those princely chambers of the Pitti Palace.  The Louvre and the Vatican hardly give you such a sense of sustained inclosure as those long passages projected over street and stream to establish a sort of inviolate transition between the two palaces of art.  We passed along the gallery in which those precious drawings by eminent hands hang chaste and gray above the swirl and murmur of the yellow Arno, and reached the ducal saloons of the Pitti.  Ducal as they are, it must be confessed that they are imperfect as show-rooms, and that, with their deep-set windows and their massive mouldings, it is rather a broken light that reaches the pictured