These are very magnificent saloons; and since I have begun to speak of
their splendor, I may as well add that the doors are framed in polished,
richly veined marble, and the walls hung with scarlet damask.

It was useless to try to see the pictures. All the artists engaged in
copying laid aside their brushes; and we looked out into the square
before the palace, where a mighty wind sprang up, and quickly raised a
prodigious cloud of dust. It hid the opposite side of the street, and
was carried, in a great dusky whirl, higher than the roofs of the houses,
higher than the top of the Pitti Palace itself. The thunder muttered and
grumbled, the lightning now and then flashed, and a few rain-drops
pattered against the windows; but, for a long time, the shower held off.
At last it came down in a stream, and lightened the air to such a degree
that we could see some of the pictures, especially those of Rubens, and
the illuminated parts of Salvator Rosa's, and, best of all, Titian's
"Magdalen," the one with golden hair clustering round her naked body.
The golden hair, indeed, seemed to throw out a glory of its own. This
Magdalen is very coarse and sensual, with only an impudent assumption of
penitence and religious sentiment, scarcely so deep as the eyelids; but
it is a splendid picture, nevertheless, with those naked, lifelike arms,
and the hands that press the rich locks about her, and so carefully
permit those voluptuous breasts to be seen. She a penitent! She would
shake off all pretence to it as easily as she would shake aside that
clustering hair. . . . . Titian must have been a very good-for-nothing
old man.

I looked again at Michael Angelo's Fates to-day; but cannot
satisfactorily make out what he meant by them. One of them--she who
holds the distaff--has her mouth open, as if uttering a cry, and might be
fancied to look somewhat irate. The second, who holds the thread, has a