Now this may all be the case, and although Taillasson may not be far wrong when he says that Salvator's "Plato," and even his "St. John in the Wilderness announcing the Birth of the Saviour," look just the least little bit like brigands, still it is unfair to base any conclusions drawn from the works upon the painter himself, and to suppose that, though he represents the wild and the terrible in such perfection, he must have been a wild and terrible person himself. He who talks most of the sword often wields it the worst; he who so feels in his heart the terror of bloody deeds that he is able to call them into existence with palette, pencil or pen, may be the least capable of practising them. Enough! of all the wicked calumnies which would represent the doughty Salvator to have been a remorseless robber and murderer, I do not believe a single word, and I hope you, dear reader, maybe of the same opinion, or I should have to cherish a certain amount of doubt whether you would quite believe what I am going to tell you about him. For--as I hope--my Salvator will appear to you as a man burning and coruscating with life and fire, but also endowed with the most charming and delightful nature, and often capable of controlling that bitter irony which--in him, as in all men of depth of character--takes form of itself from observation of life. Moreover, it is known that Salvator was as good a poet and musician as a painter, his inward genius displaying itself in rays thrown in various directions. I repeat that I have no belief in his having had anything to do with the crimes of Mas' Aniello; I rather hold to the opinion that he was driven from Naples to Rome by the terror of the time, and arrived there as a fugitive at the very time of Mas' Aniello's fall. There was nothing very remarkable about his dress, and, with a little purse containing a few zecchini in his pocket, he slipped in at the gate just as night was falling. Without exactly knowing how, he came to the Piazza Navoni, where, in happier days, he had formerly lived in a fine house close to the Palazzo Pamphili. Looking up at the great shining windows, glittering and sparkling in the moonbeams, he cried, with some humour, "Ha! it will cost many a canvass ere I can establish my studio there again." Just as he said so he suddenly felt as if paralysed in all his limbs, and, at the same time, feeble and powerless in a manner which he had never before experienced in all his life. As he sank down on the stone steps of the portico of the house he murmured between his teeth, "Shall I ever want canvasses? It seems to me that _I_ have done with them."