Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might as well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as the ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of print-shops. The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the exercise of it, I think, had better be confined to manufacture of marble fireplaces." As we shall see, he modified this radical view before he left Italy; but there is some ground of truth in it, nevertheless. Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice to record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust, or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good a likeness as this cheap print. You see the whole line of Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed, shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with a simple kind of heartiness and truth that make one somewhat good-natured towards them." "I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay, and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But, upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find sympathetic.