wrought by the matchless hand of Cellini-early Florentine bronzes,
priceless specimens of Raffaele ware and Venetian glass--the precious
trifles, in short, which the collector of mediaeval curiosities amasses
for his heirs to disperse amongst the palaces of kings and the cabinets
of nations--were dragged again to unfamiliar light. The invaded
sepulchral building seemed a very Pompeii of the /Cinque Cento/.
To examine, arrange, methodise, select for national purposes, such
miscellaneous treasures would be the work of weeks. For easier access,
Darrell caused a slight hasty passage to be thrown over the gap between
the two edifices. It ran from the room nicked into the gables of the old
house, which, originally fitted up for scientific studies, now became his
habitual apartment, into the largest of the uncompleted chambers which
had been designed for the grand reception-gallery of the new building.
Into the pompous gallery thus made contiguous to his monk-like cell, he
gradually gathered the choicest specimens of his collection. The damps
were expelled by fires on grateless hearthstones; sunshine admitted from
windows now for the first time exchanging boards for glass; rough iron
sconces, made at the nearest forge, were thrust into the walls, and
sometimes lighted at night-Darrell and Fairthorn walking arm-in-arm along
the unpolished floors, in company with Holbein's Nobles, Perugino's
Virgins. Some of that highbred company displaced and banished the next
day, as repeated inspection made the taste more rigidly exclusive.
Darrell had found object, amusement, occupation--frivolous if Compared
with those lenses, and glasses, and algebraical scrawls which had once
whiled lonely hours in the attic-room hard by; but not frivolous even to
the judgment of the austerest sage, if that sage had not reasoned away
his heart. For here it was not Darrell's taste that was delighted; it
was Darrell's heart that, ever hungry, had found food. His heart was
connecting those long-neglected memorials of an ambition baffled and
relinquished--here with a nation, there with his father's grave! How his