most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, most consoling
masterpiece for my reader to go and see for himself; it is almost worth
going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the
like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men standing up there to
be shot, where already their friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled
top-hat in the foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head
would have had.




VIII


Besides this and those other histories there were energetic portraits
and vigorous landscapes in the Modern Museum, where if we had not been
bent so on visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willingly have
spent the whole morning. But we were determined to see the Peruvian and
Mexican antiquities which we believed must be treasured up in it; and
that we might not fail of finding it, I gave one of the custodians a
special peseta to take us out on the balcony and show us exactly how to
get to it. He was so precise and so full in. his directions that we
spent the next half-hour in wandering fatuously round the whole region
before we stumbled, almost violently, upon it immediately back of the
Modern Museum. Will, it be credited that it was then hardly worth seeing
for the things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican antiquities
were so disappointing that we would hardly look at the Etruscan, Greek,
and Roman things which it was so much richer in. To be sure, we had seen
and overseen the like of these long before in Italy; but they were
admirably arranged in this museum, so that without the eager help of the