been obliged to commit himself definitely to one reading or another.
Taking the verses all round, I should say that Mr Pontifex was right in
considering them suitable to the day; I don't like being too hard even on
the Mer de Glace, so will give no opinion as to whether they are suitable
to the scene also.

Mr Pontifex went on to the Great St Bernard and there he wrote some more
verses, this time I am afraid in Latin. He also took good care to be
properly impressed by the Hospice and its situation. "The whole of this
most extraordinary journey seemed like a dream, its conclusion
especially, in gentlemanly society, with every comfort and accommodation
amidst the rudest rocks and in the region of perpetual snow. The thought
that I was sleeping in a convent and occupied the bed of no less a person
than Napoleon, that I was in the highest inhabited spot in the old world
and in a place celebrated in every part of it, kept me awake some time."
As a contrast to this, I may quote here an extract from a letter written
to me last year by his grandson Ernest, of whom the reader will hear more
presently. The passage runs: "I went up to the Great St Bernard and saw
the dogs." In due course Mr Pontifex found his way into Italy, where the
pictures and other works of art--those, at least, which were fashionable
at that time--threw him into genteel paroxysms of admiration. Of the
Uffizi Gallery at Florence he writes: "I have spent three hours this
morning in the gallery and I have made up my mind that if of all the
treasures I have seen in Italy I were to choose one room it would be the
Tribune of this gallery. It contains the Venus de' Medici, the
Explorator, the Pancratist, the Dancing Faun and a fine Apollo. These
more than outweigh the Laocoon and the Belvedere Apollo at Rome. It
contains, besides, the St John of Raphael and many other _chefs-d'oeuvre_
of the greatest masters in the world." It is interesting to compare Mr
Pontifex's effusions with the rhapsodies of critics in our own times. Not