But other artists than Peter Paul had passed this way. He painted only the Sabine name; they, the scene. An ancient shepherd, strayed from one of Piranesi’s ruins, watched them from a rock above the road, leaning on his staff. A flock of goats, kneeling ruminatively in the shade of an oak tree, their black bearded faces, their twisted horns sharply outlined against the bright blue sky, grouped themselves professionally—good beasts! they had studied the art of pictorial composition under the best masters—in momentary expectation of Rosa da Tivoli’s arrival. And the same Italianising Dutchman was surely responsible for that flock of dusty sheep, those dogs, those lads with staves and that burly master shepherd, dressed like a capripede in goatskin breeches and mounted on the back of a little donkey, whose smallness contributed by contrast to the portly dignity of its rider. Nor were Dutchmen and Flemings the only foreign painters in this Italian scene. There were trees, there were glades in the woods, there were rocks that belonged by right of conquest to Nicolas Poussin. Half close the eyes, and that grey stone becomes a ruined sepulchre: _Et ego in Arcadia_ ...; the village there, on the hill-top, across the valley, flowers into a little city of colonnades and cupolas and triumphal arches, and the peasants working in the fields are the people of a transcendental Arcadia gravely and soberly engaged in pursuing the True, the rationally Good and Beautiful. So much for the foreground and the middle distance. But suddenly, from the crest of a long descent, the remote wide background of Poussin’s ideal world revealed itself: the vale of the Tiber, the broken plain of the Campagna, and in the midst—fantastic, improbable—the solitary cone of Mount Soracte, dim and blue against the blue of the sky. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER III From the heights of the Pincio Mr. Falx denounced the city that lay spread out below him. “Marvellous, isn’t it?” Mrs. Aldwinkle had said. Rome was one of her private properties. “But every stone of it,” said Mr. Falx, “raised by slave labour. Every stone! Millions of wretches have sweated and toiled and died”—Mr. Falx’s voice rose, his language became richer and richer, he gesticulated as though he were addressing a public meeting—“in order that these palaces, these stately churches, these forums, amphitheatres, cloaca maximas and what-nots might be here to-day to gratify your idle eyes. Is it worth it, I ask you? Is the momentary gratification of a few idlers a sufficient reason for the secular oppression of millions of human beings, their brothers, their equals in the eyes of God? Is it, I ask again? No, a thousand times no.” With his right fist Mr. Falx thumped the open palm of his left hand. “No!”