give you two minutes and a half for each side, two for the ceiling, and
three for studying Murray's explanations or mine. Two minutes and a
half you have got, then--(and I observed, during my five weeks' work in
the chapel, that English visitors seldom gave so much)--to read this
scheme given you by Simon Memmi of human spiritual education. In order
to understand the purport of it, in any the smallest degree, you must
summon to your memory, in the course of these two minutes and a half,
what you happen to be acquainted with of the doctrines and characters
of Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Aristotle, Dionysius the Areopagite, St.
Augustine, and the emperor Justinian, and having further observed the
expressions and actions attributed by the painter to these personages,
judge how far he has succeeded in reaching a true and worthy ideal of
them, and how large or how subordinate a part in his general scheme of
human learning he supposes their peculiar doctrines properly to occupy.
For myself, being, to my much sorrow, now an old person; and, to my
much pride, an old-fashioned one, I have not found my powers either of
reading or memory in the least increased by any of Mr. Stephenson's or
Mr. Wheatstone's inventions; and though indeed I came here from Lucca
in three hours instead of a day, which it used to take, I do not think
myself able, on that account, to see any picture in Florence in less
time than it took formerly, or even obliged to hurry myself in any
investigations connected with it.

Accordingly, I have myself taken five weeks to see the quarter of this
picture of Simon Memmi's: and can give you a fairly good account of
that quarter, and some partial account of a fragment or two of those on
the other walls: but, alas! only of their pictorial qualities in either
case; for I don't myself know anything whatever, worth trusting to,
about Pythagoras, or Dionysius the Areopagite; and have not had, and
never shall have, probably, any time to learn much of them; while in