On one side, on an easel, stood Hippolito de Medici (a portrait by
Titian), with a boar-spear in his hand, looking through those he saw,
till you turned away from the keen glance; and thrown together in heaps
were landscapes of the same hand, green pastoral hills and vales, and
shepherds piping to their mild mistresses underneath the flowering
shade. Reader, 'if thou hast not seen the Louvre thou art damned!'--for
thou hast not seen the choicest remains of the works of art; or thou
hast not seen all these together with their mutually reflected glories.
I say nothing of the statues; for I know but little of sculpture, and
never liked any till I saw the Elgin Marbles. . . . Here, for four
months together, I strolled and studied, and daily heard the warning
sound--'Quatres heures passees, il faut fermer, Citoyens'--(Ah! why did
they ever change their style?) muttered in coarse provincial French; and
brought away with me some loose draughts and fragments, which I have
been forced to part with, like drops of life-blood, for 'hard money.'
How often, thou tenantless mansion of godlike magnificence--how often
has my heart since gone a pilgrimage to thee!

It has been made a question, whether the artist, or the mere man of
taste and natural sensibility, receives most pleasure from the
contemplation of works of art; and I think this question might be
answered by another as a sort of _experimentum crucis_, namely, whether
any one out of that 'number numberless' of mere gentlemen and amateurs,
who visited Paris at the period here spoken of, felt as much interest,
as much pride or pleasure in this display of the most striking monuments
of art as the humblest student would? The first entrance into the
Louvre would be only one of the events of his journey, not an event in
his life, remembered ever after with thankfulness and regret. He would
explore it with the same unmeaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would
the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden in the Tuileries, but