at
produced by a wax-work show. Nature was travestied; ease, grace,
freedom, were wanting: evidently the thirty years might have been better
spent collecting beetles or dried grasses.

Around the walls of the studio hung sketches painted during visits the
artist had made to the East. Here were studies of Eastern heads,
costumes, trees, soil by river-side, sand in the desert, copied with
scrupulous care and precise truth, yet, when they were all together in
the great painting, the combined effect was a failure.

The artist, they said, had, during this long period, received an annual
pension of so many roubles from the Russian government, and had taken
his time about it. At last it was completed; the painting that had
outlasted a generation was to be sent to St. Petersburg to hibernate
after a lifetime spent in sunny Italy. Well! after all, it was better
worth the money paid for it than that paid for nine tenths of those
kingly toys in the baby-house Green Chambers of Dresden. _Le Roi
s'amuse!_

And the white-haired Saxons came in shoals to the studio to see the
painting with thirty years' labor on it, and accordingly as their
oracles had judged it, so did they: for behold! gay colors are tabooed
in the mythology of the Pokerites, and are classed with perfumes,
dance-music, and jollity, and art earns a precarious livelihood in their
land, where all knowledge of it is supposed to be tied up with the
enjoyers of primogeniture.

ROMAN THEATRES.

The Apollo, where grand opera, sandwiched with moral ballets, is given
for the benefit of foreigners, principally, would be a fine house if you
could only see it; but when Caper was in Rome, the oil-lamps, showing
you where to sit down, did not reveal its proportions, or the dresses of
the box-beauties, to any advantage; and as oil-lamps will smoke, there
settled a veil over the theatre towards the second act, that draped
Comedy like Tragedy, and then set her to coughing.

During Carnival a melancholy ball or two was given there: a few wild
foreigners venturing in masked, believed they had mistaken the house,
for although many women were wandering around in domino, they found the
Roman young men unmasked, walking about dressed in canes and those
dress-coats, familiarly known as tail-coats, which cause a man to look
like a swallow with the legs of a crane, and wearing on their impassive
faces the appearance of men waiting for an oyster-supper--or an
earthquake.

The commis