I lunched with Barrère again to-day, and afterwards we went in his motor to the lakes of Nemi and Albano. It was a very interesting drive, and the lakes are really beautiful, though in a grave and sombre way. Of course it was not bright sunlight, but in any case the landscape here has a peculiar character. It has an ancient and desert look, hardly joyous and not very fruitful, different entirely in this respect from the landscape around Florence. But it has character, and what one may call style: and the remains of ruined buildings, aqueduct or tomb, which cut the sky at every turn, seem to belong to these surroundings. The landscape is of their date, seems almost to have remained of their date, and not to have found the renewed youth which mocks antiquity in other kinds of scenery. A certain gravity is the prevailing sentiment--impressive but touched with sadness. I am seeing isolated bits of Rome little by little. If I were settled here for long I think the sculpture would attract me as a study--but like everything else in the way of art in Rome one has to be constantly sifting and sorting the good from the bad. Here as elsewhere there is a mass of indifferent achievement, a mass of work either poorly copied from the Greek or poorly conceived and lacking vitality. One feels more and more that the Romans were not artists--great collectors I have no doubt, and perhaps connoisseurs--but without the finest fire of the spirit. There are a few great things here that are superb, and others doubtless which I haven’t seen, but in many instances of even admired things there is not the saving quality of life that makes Phidias seem modern as well as great. Yours, JOE.” Touching this last criticism he made us laugh when he got home by saying that he longed to cry to the crowds who patiently paced the Vatican galleries, guide-book in hand: “Go out into the sunshine, dear people, and enjoy your lunch--this is all bosh.” It was delightful to me the other day to find a perfect echo of these sentiments in the letters of the late Mr. Stopford Brooke to his daughters. But it is not the only instance in those enthralling volumes where I noted a remarkable likeness in many of the views, and even in the method of expressing them, of these two brilliant Irishmen. CHAPTER XI FISHING HOLIDAYS