which the artist
presented to Mrs. Browning. "Both of us," wrote Robert Browning of this
gift, "would have fain escaped being the subjects of such princely
generosity; but there was no withstanding his delicacy and
noble-mindedness." Mrs. Jameson was much in Rome in the early years of
the 1850-60 decade, living in the old port by the Tiber nearly opposite
to the new and splendid building of the law courts. Near the Tarpeian
Rock Frederika Bremer had perched, in a tiny room of which she took all
the frugal care, even to washing the blue cups and plates when she
invited the Hawthornes to a tea of a simplicity that suggested, indeed,
the utmost degree of "light" housekeeping. Thomas Buchanan Read was one
of the hosts and guests of this social group, and it was at a dinner he
gave that Hawthorne met Gibson, whose conversational talents were
evidently (upon that occasion) chiefly employed in contemning the
pre-Raphaelite school of painters and emphasizing the need of sculptors
to discover and to follow the principles of the Greeks,--"a fair
doctrine, but one which Mr. Gibson fails to practise," observes
Hawthorne. The Brownings were variously bestowed in Rome through
succeeding winters,--in the Bocca di Leone, in the Via del Tritone and
elsewhere. Mrs. Browning, as her "Casa Guida Windows" and many other
poems attest, took always the deepest interest in Italian politics.
American and English friends come and go, but the little group of
residents and the more permanent sojourners, as the Hawthornes and the
Brownings, continue their daily variations on life in the social dinners
and teas, the excursions and the sight-seeing of the wonderful city.

Only the magician could "call up the vanished past again" and summon
into an undeniable materialization those charming figures to come forth
out of the shadowy air of the rich, historic past, and stand before us
in the full light of contemporary attention. Not alone this group of
choice persons, but the environment of their time, the very atmosphere,
are demanded of this necromancy. The figure of Adelaide Kemble (Mrs.
Sartoris) is one of these, and the tradition still survives of a concert
given in the splendid, spacious hall of the Palazzo Colonna where she
was the prima donna of the occasion. There were also musicals at the
house of Mrs. Sartoris, where the guests met her famous sister, Fanny
Kemble. Mrs. Browning was fond of both the sisters, and said of them
that their social br