B. Bartholdy, Prussian consul-general in Rome, an intelligent man and much interested in art, had travelled up from Rome to Florence with Cockerell and made himself one of his most intimate acquaintances. Walking together one day in the Uffizi, they examined the group of the Niobe. It is now neglected and forgotten, but in those days it occupied, in the estimation of artists, the place to-day held by the Elgin Marbles. With the Venus de' Medici, the Apollo Belvedere, and the Torso in the Vatican, these statues were regarded as the greatest remains antiquity had bequeathed to the modern world. But, prized and studied as they were, the purpose of so many figures, evidently meant to stand together, had never yet dawned on the minds of their admirers. The figure of Niobe, which is the largest, had been placed in the middle, and the rest in a circle round her. It was felt indeed that this could not be right, but no one had anything better to suggest, and it remained one of the favourite puzzles for art lovers to wrangle over. Into the middle of this clouded state of intelligences Cockerell dropped as from another planet. The experience of the Æginetan statues, which he had arranged so laboriously, besides the constant sight of what remained of the Parthenon and other Greek monuments, made the notion of a pediment or [Greek: haetos] so familiar as to present itself to his mind at once as the only possible destination for so many statues. He says the first suggestion came on that occasion from Bartholdy. "I have told Schlegel and all parties that it was first proposed by you;" to which Bartholdy replies: "J'aurai le plaisir de pouvoir dire que vous avez fait fructifier un petit grain tombé de la main d'un amateur des beaux arts qui sans cela serait resté stérile." But it was probably the company of Cockerell and the associations with Ægina &c. which suggested the notion to Bartholdy. At all events, beyond that first suggestion, Bartholdy did nothing. It was Cockerell who measured the statues, arranged them, proved the case, and made the etching which hangs to this day in the Niobe Room in the Uffizi Gallery, showing the arrangement which he proposed. In recognition, however, of the part Bartholdy had had in it, the plate was dedicated to him. For the introduction of Cockerell as a lion into society--if that be a thing to be desired--this discovery was most opportune. He had arrived with a great reputation as a traveller, a discoverer, and unraveller of age-long puzzles, as in the case of the Temple of the Giants, and now here was a proof of his powers exhibited in the centre of artistic Europe.