latter, being opposite to the light, are not seen to the best advantage;
but it is the most perfect collection, in a chronological series, that I
have seen, comprehending specimens of all the masters since painting
began to be an art. Here are Giotto, and Cimabue, and Botticelli, and
Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and a hundred others, who have haunted
me in churches and galleries ever since I have been in Italy, and who
ought to interest me a great deal more than they do. Occasionally to-day
I was sensible of a certain degree of emotion in looking at an old
picture; as, for example, by a large, dark, ugly picture of Christ
hearing the cross and sinking beneath it, when, somehow or other, a sense
of his agony, and the fearful wrong that mankind did (and does) its
Redeemer, and the scorn of his enemies, and the sorrow of those who loved
him, came knocking at any heart and got entrance there. Once more I deem
it a pity that Protestantism should have entirely laid aside this mode of
appealing to the religious sentiment.

I chiefly paid attention to the sculpture, and was interested in a long
series of busts of the emperors and the members of their families, and
some of the great men of Rome. There is a bust of Pompey the Great,
bearing not the slightest resemblance to that vulgar and unintellectual
one in the gallery of the Capitol, altogether a different cast of
countenance. I could not judge whether it resembled the face of the
statue, having seen the latter so imperfectly in the duskiness of the
hall of the Spada Palace. These, I presume, are the busts which Mr.
Powers condemns, from internal evidence, as unreliable and conventional.
He may be right,--and is far more likely, of course, to be right than I
am,--yet there certainly seems to be character in these marble faces, and
they differ as much among themselves as the same number of living faces
might. The bust of Caracalla, however, which Powers excepted from his
censure, certainly does give stronger assurance of its being an