In another part of the palace, I saw Guido’s great picture of Aurora. I noticed the mark of the French cannon ball that went through it when Garibaldi was defending Rome. Bought a copy of Guido’s Cenci, and then went and looked at the Angelo bridge, where they cut off the head of Beatrice. I went often to Mr. Freeman’s studio. He was the first American painter to live in Rome. He was, too, the first U.S. Consul to Italy, and he it was who protected Margaret Fuller, on a time, from the danger of a mob. It was at the time the French forced their way into Rome. He planted the Stars and Stripes on her balcony, and the mob fell back. That was in 1849. Freeman painted a picture for me that has inspired a poem by J. Buchanan Read. It was “The Princess.” The model was a blonde, with hair like gold. Freeman corrected my notion that there were no blondes in Italy. There are many, just as there were in the time of the earlier masters. Yellow was Titian’s favorite color. Freeman told me much of Rome, as it was when he first went there, in 1840. He lived there under three popes, Gregory, Pius IX and Leo XIII. Rome was entirely different from to-day. The houses had open entrances, or, where there were doors, they swung outward to the street, like American barn doors. There were almost no sidewalks, and the few seen were only wide enough for one person. The streets were dimly lighted by occasional oil lamps, great distances apart. Of course, assassination in such streets was of common occurrence. The water spouts of the houses were so projected as to empty themselves in cataracts on the heads of passers-by. The pavements were made of cobble stones, that had to be covered with straw or earth when the Pope went abroad in his grandeur. The city was full of foreign artists, along in the fifties, as now. Among them were Crawford and Greenough, Story and _West_, whom Byron called “_Europe’s worst painter and poor England’s best_.” The fact is, West was a Pennsylvania Quaker, though he became King George’s court artist, and at last got buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. I went often to the Vatican, not to see the palace itself, for that impressed me not at all, or only as a great and miscellaneous pile, but to see a certain picture there. The artist who made it was but thirty-seven years old when he died. Yet, it has been said that in the “Transfiguration” one sees “the last perfection of art.” This picture seems to be one of those things that no one ever thinks to try to emulate. Like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, nothing of their kind came before them, and nothing is looked for to follow them.