had been admitted to that sacred room where, with long silver beard and
undimmed eye, amid a pantheon of his own creations, the ancient Titian,
patriarch of art, still lingered upon earth, and told old tales of the
Bellinis, and Raffaelle, and Michael Angelo, and the building of St.
Peter's, and the fire at Venice, and the sack of Rome, and of kings and
warriors, statesmen and poets, long since gone to their account, and
showed the sacred brush which Francis the First had stooped to pick up
for him. And (license forbidden to Sidney by his friend Languet) he had
been to Rome, and seen (much to the scandal of good Protestants at home)
that "right good fellow," as Sidney calls him, who had not yet eaten
himself to death, the Pope for the time being. And he had seen the
frescos of the Vatican, and heard Palestrina preside as chapel-master
over the performance of his own music beneath the dome of St. Peter's,
and fallen half in love with those luscious strains, till he was
awakened from his dream by the recollection that beneath that same dome
had gone up thanksgivings to the God of heaven for those blood-stained
streets, and shrieking women, and heaps of insulted corpses, which he
had beheld in Paris on the night of St. Bartholomew. At last, a few
months before his father died, he had taken back his pupils to their
home in Germany, from whence he was dismissed, as he wrote, with rich
gifts; and then Mrs. Leigh's heart beat high, at the thought that the
wanderer would return: but, alas! within a month after his father's
death, came a long letter from Frank, describing the Alps, and the
valleys of the Waldenses (with whose Barbes he had had much talk about
the late horrible persecutions), and setting forth how at Padua he had
made the acquaintance of that illustrious scholar and light of the age,
Stephanus Parmenius (commonly called from his native place, Budaeus),
who had visited Geneva with him, and heard the disputations of their
most learned doctors, which both he and Budaeus disliked for their hard
judgments both of God and man, as much as they admired them for their