Then they played Leonardo Da Vinci. I had not intended saying how cordially I dislike him, but presently they became enthusiastic about the head of the Virgin in the “Vierge aux Rochers” in our Gallery. I said Leonardo had not succeeded with this head; he had succeeded with the angel’s head lower down to the right (I think) of the picture, but had failed with the Madonna. They did not like my talking about Leonardo Da Vinci as now succeeding and now failing, just like other people. I said it was perhaps fortunate that we knew the “Last Supper” only by engravings and might fancy the original to have been more full of individuality than the engravings are, and I greatly questioned whether I should have liked the work if I had seen it as it was when Leonardo left it. As for his caricatures he should not have done them, much less preserved them; the fact of his having set store by them was enough to show that there was a screw loose about him somewhere and that he had no sense of humour. Still, I admitted that I liked him better than I did Michael Angelo. Whatever we touched upon the same fatality attended us. Fortunately neither evolution nor politics came under discussion, nor yet, happily, music, or they would have praised Beethoven and very likely Mendelssohn too. They did begin to run Nuremberg and it was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Yes, but there’s the flavour of _Faust_ and Goethe”; however, I did not. In course of time the séance ended, though not till nearly ten o’clock, and we all went to bed. Next morning we saw them at breakfast and they were quite tame. As Gogin said afterwards: “They came and sat on our fingers and ate crumbs out of our hands.” [1887.] At Montreuil-sur-Mer Jones and I lunched at the Hôtel de France where we found everything very good. As we were going out, the landlady, getting on towards eighty, with a bookish nose, pale blue eyes and a Giovanni Bellini’s Loredano Loredani kind of expression, came up to us and said, in sweetly apologetic accents:— “Avez-vous donc déjeuné à peu près selon vos idées, Messieurs?” It would have been too much for her to suppose that she had been able to give us a repast that had fully realised our ideals, still she hoped that these had been, at any rate, adumbrated in the luncheon she had provided. Dear old thing: of course they had and a great deal more than adumbrated. [26 December, 1901.] XVII Material for a Projected Sequel to _Alps and Sanctuaries_ Mrs. Dowe on Alps and Sanctuaries AFTER reading _Alps and Sanctuaries_ Mrs. Dowe said to Ballard: “You seem to hear him talking to you all the time you are reading.” I don’t think I ever heard a criticism of my books which pleased me better, especially as Mrs. Dowe is one of the women I have always liked. Not to be Omitted