is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild,
ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a new
sentiment.

Here, and at the Borghese Palace, there were some pictures by Garofalo,
an artist of whom I never heard before, but who seemed to have been a man
of power. A picture by Marie Subleyras--a miniature copy from one by her
husband, of the woman anointing the feet of Christ--is most delicately
and beautifully finished, and would be an ornament to a drawing-room; a
thing that could not truly be said of one in a hundred of these grim
masterpieces. When they were painted life was not what it is now, and
the artists had not the same ends in view. . . . . It depresses the
spirits to go from picture to picture, leaving a portion of your vital
sympathy at every one, so that you come, with a kind of half-torpid
desperation, to the end. On our way down the staircase we saw several
noteworthy bas-reliefs, and among them a very ancient one of Curtius
plunging on horseback into the chasm in the Forum. It seems to me,
however, that old sculpture affects the spirits even more dolefully than
old painting; it strikes colder to the heart, and lies heavier upon it,
being marble, than if it were merely canvas.

My wife went to revisit the museum, which we had already seen, on the
other side of the piazza; but, being cold, I left her there, and went out
to ramble in the sun; for it was now brightly, though fitfully, shining
again. I walked through the Forum (where a thorn thrust itself out and
tore the sleeve of my talma) and under the Arch of Titus, towards the
Coliseum. About a score of French drummers were beating a long, loud
roll-call, at the base of the Coliseum, and under its arches; and a score
of trumpeters responded to these, from the rising ground opposite the
Arch of Constantine; and the echoes of the old Roman ruins, especially