him and they were tired of his very name, and never wanted to have
his etchings and pastels thrown in their faces again. What they would
like to do was to discover the Italian town or village where no artist
had ever been seen and the word art had never been uttered.

But it was Venetian painting that got most on their nerves. They had
given it a fair chance, they protested. "Trot out your Tintorettos,"
they said to Camillo every morning, and he carried them off to the
Palace, and the Academy, and more churches than they thought there were
in the world, and at last to the _Scuola di San Rocco_. And there a
solemn man in spectacles took them in hand. They said to him too: "Trot
our your Tintorettos," and he led them up to a big, dingy canvas, and
they said: "Trot out your next," and they went the rounds of them all,
and they asked, "Where's your Duveneck?" and he said he had never heard
of Duveneck, and they said, "Why, he's here!" and they left him hunting,
and were back in their _gondola_ in ten minutes, and they guessed they
could do with Rubens! I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and
my highly intellectual friends at home, religiously studying Baedeker
and reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich talking of
art and of Venice. And I must have been painfully scandalized had I not
got so much further on with my education as to have a glimmering of the
truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British
public--that an artist knows more about art than the man who isn't an
artist, and has the best right to an opinion on the subject.

Perhaps their disappointment in Venice was the reason of their
pre-occupation with Munich. Certainly "Now, at Munich" was the beginning
and end of the talk as "when 'the boys' were here" had been before they
came. They would not admit that anything good could exist outside of
Munich. I remember Duveneck once suggesting that Paris was the best
place for the student, to whom it was a help just to see what was going
on around him.

"But what does go on round the student there?" McFarlane interrupted.
"It's all fads in Paris. What do they talk about in Paris to-day but
values? [This, remember, was more than a quarter of a century ago.]
That's all they teach the student, all they think of. Look at Bisbing's
picture last year. They all raved over it, said it was the _clou_ of
the Salon, medalled it, bought it for the Luxembourg, and I don't know
wha