We may judge, from “the style, the matter, and the drift” of this discourse, that it emanated from the same sculptor who is mentioned, in “Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,” as having traduced Margaret Fuller and her husband Count Ossoli. As Tennyson says, “A lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,” and this fellow would seem to have been an adept in unveracious exaggeration. It is remarkable that Hawthorne should have given serious attention to such a man; but an English critic said in regard to this same incident that if Hawthorne had been a more communicative person, if he had talked freely to a larger number of people, he would not have been so easily prejudiced by those few with whom he was chiefly intimate. To which it could be added, that he might also have taken broader views in regard to public affairs. Hawthorne was fortunate to have been present at the discovery of the St. Petersburg “Venus,” the twin sister of the “Venus dé Medici,” which was dug up in a vineyard outside the Porta Portese. The proprietor of the vineyard, who made his fortune at a stroke by the discovery, happened to select the site for a new building over the buried ruins of an ancient villa, and the “Venus” was discovered in what appeared to Hawthorne as an old Roman bath-room. The statue was in more perfect preservation than the “Venus dé Medici,” both of whose arms have been restored, and Hawthorne noticed that the head was larger and the face more characteristic, with wide-open eyes and a more confident expression. He was one of the very few who saw it before it was transported to St. Petersburg, and a thorough artistic analysis of it is still one of the _desiderata_. The difference in expression, however, would seem to be in favor of the “Venus dé Medici,” as more in accordance with the ruling motive of the figure. Miss Una Hawthorne had not sufficiently recovered to travel until the last of May, when they all set forth northward by way of Genoa and Marseilles, in which latter place we find them on the 28th, enjoying the comfort and elegance of a good French hotel. Thence they proceeded to Avignon, but did not find much to admire there except the Rhone; so they continued to Geneva, the most pleasant, homelike resting place in Europe, but quite deficient in other attractions.