each courtier or ambassador, or whatever dignity it might be, alighted.
Most of them had on gold-embroidered court-dresses; some of them had
military uniforms, and medals in abundance at the breast; and ladies also
came, looking like heaps of lace and gauze in the carriages, but lightly
shaking themselves into shape as they went up the steps. By and by a
trumpet sounded, a drum beat, and again appeared a succession of half a
dozen royal equipages, each with its six horses, its postilion, coachman,
and three footmen, grand with cocked hats and embroidery; and the
gray-headed, bowing Grand Duke and his nodding Grand Duchess as before.
The Noble Guard ranged themselves on horseback opposite the loggia; but
there was no irksome and impertinent show of ceremony and restraint upon
the people. The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the
President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back
their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the
Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign.

This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his
first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything
he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of
bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de'
Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted
upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that
used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the
same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the
greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with
some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine
and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with
her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself. I looked at Michael
Angelo's Madonna, in which William Ware saw such prophetic depth of
feeling; but I suspect it was one of the many instances in which the