"I revisited the Florence Gallery, &c. My former impressions were confirmed; but there were too many visiters there to allow one to _feel_ any thing properly. When we were (about thirty or forty) all stuffed into the cabinet of gems and knick-knackeries, in a corner of one of the galleries, I told Rogers that it 'felt like being in the watchhouse.' I left him to make his obeisances to some of his acquaintances, and strolled on alone--the only four minutes I could snatch of any feeling for the works around me. I do not mean to apply this to a _tête-à-tête_ scrutiny with Rogers, who has an excellent taste, and deep feeling for the arts, (indeed much more of both than I can possess, for of the FORMER I have not much,) but to the crowd of jostling starers and travelling talkers around me. "I heard one bold Briton declare to the woman on his arm, looking at the Venus of Titian, 'Well, now, this is really very fine indeed,'--an observation which, like that of the landlord in Joseph Andrews on 'the certainty of death,' was (as the landlord's wife observed) 'extremely true.' "In the Pitti Palace, I did not omit Goldsmith's prescription for a connoisseur, viz. 'that the pictures would have been better if the painter had taken more pains, and to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.'" * * * * * LETTER 466. TO MR. MURRAY. "Pisa, November 3. 1821. "The two passages cannot be altered without making Lucifer talk like the Bishop of Lincoln, which would not be in the character of the former. The notion is from Cuvier (that of the _old worlds_), as I have explained in an additional note to the preface. The other passage is also in character: if _nonsense_, so much the better, because then it can do no harm, and the sillier Satan is made, the safer for every body. As to 'alarms,' &c. do you really think such things ever led any body astray? Are these people more impious than Milton's Satan? or the Prometheus of Æschylus? or even than the Sadducees of * *, the 'Fall of Jerusalem' * *? Are not Adam, Eve, Adah, and Abel, as pious as the catechism?