hours I spend with you are pure profit. They are _suggestive_! Just as
the truly religious soul is always at worship, the genuine artist is
always in labour. He takes his property wherever he finds it, and learns
some precious secret from every object that stands up in the light. If
you but knew the rapture of observation! I gather with every glance some
hint for light, for colour, or relief! When I get home, I pour out my
treasures into the lap of toy Madonna. Oh, I am not idle! _Nulla dies
sine linea_."

I was introduced in Florence to an American lady whose drawing-room had
long formed an attractive place of reunion for the foreign residents. She
lived on a fourth floor, and she was not rich; but she offered her
visitors very good tea, little cakes at option, and conversation not
quite to match. Her conversation had mainly an aesthetic flavour, for
Mrs. Coventry was famously "artistic." Her apartment was a sort of Pitti
Palace _au petit pied_. She possessed "early masters" by the dozen--a
cluster of Peruginos in her dining-room, a Giotto in her boudoir, an
Andrea del Sarto over her drawing-room chimney-piece. Surrounded by
these treasures, and by innumerable bronzes, mosaics, majolica dishes,
and little worm-eaten diptychs covered with angular saints on gilded
backgrounds, our hostess enjoyed the dignity of a sort of high-priestess
of the arts. She always wore on her bosom a huge miniature copy of the
Madonna della Seggiola. Gaining her ear quietly one evening, I asked her
whether she knew that remarkable man, Mr. Theobald.

"Know him!" she exclaimed; "know poor Theobald! All Florence knows him,
his flame-coloured locks, his black velvet coat, his interminable
harangues on the beautiful, and his wondrous Madonna that mortal eye has
never seen, and that mortal patience has quite given up expecting."