"Here"--he resumed, arising and leaning on my arm as he sauntered around the apartment--"here are paintings from the Greeks to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to the present hour. Many are chosen, as you see, with little deference to the opinions of Virtû. They are all, however, fitting tapestry for a chamber such as this. Here too, are some _chéf d'oeuvres_ of the unknown great--and here unfinished designs by men, celebrated in their day, whose very names the perspicacity of the academies has left to silence and to me. What think you"--said he, turning abruptly as he spoke--"what think you of this Madonna della Pietà?" "It is Guido's own!" I said, with all the enthusiasm of my nature, for I had been poring intently over its surpassing loveliness. "It is Guido's own!--how _could_ you have obtained it?--she is undoubtedly in painting what the Venus is in sculpture." "Ha!" said he, thoughtfully, "the Venus?--the beautiful Venus--the Venus of the Medicis?--she of the gilded hair?--the work of Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian? Part of the left arm (here his voice dropped so as to be heard with difficulty,) and all the right are restorations, and in the coquetry of that right arm lies, I think, the quintessence of all affectation. The Apollo too!--is a copy--there can be no doubt of it--blind fool that I am, who cannot behold the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help--pity me!--I cannot help preferring the Antinous. Was it not Socrates who said that the statuary _found his statue in the block of marble_? Then Michæl Angelo was by no means original in his couplet-- 'Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto Chè un marmo solo in se non circunscriva.'" * * * * * It has been, or should be remarked, that, in the manner of the true gentlemen, we are always aware of a difference from the bearing of the vulgar, without being at once precisely able to determine in what such difference consists. Allowing the remark to have applied in its full force to the outward demeanor of my acquaintance, I felt it, on that eventful morning, still more fully applicable to his moral temperament and character. Nor can I better define that peculiarity of spirit which seemed to place him so essentially apart from all other human beings, than by calling it a _habit_ of intense and continual thought, pervading even his most trivial actions--intruding upon his moments of dalliance--and interweaving itself with his very flashes of merriment--like adders which writhe from out the eyes of the grinning masks in the cornices around the temples of Persepolis.