y, and his expression singularly gentle and
acquiescent; the more so for a certain pallid leanness of visage, which I
hardly knew whether to refer to the consuming fire of genius or to a
meagre diet. A very little talk, however, cleared his brow and brought
back his eloquence.

"And this is your first visit to these enchanted halls?" he cried.
"Happy, thrice happy youth!" And taking me by the arm, he prepared to
lead me to each of the pre-eminent works in turn and show me the cream of
the gallery. But before we left the Mantegna he pressed my arm and gave
it a loving look. "_He_ was not in a hurry," he murmured. "He knew
nothing of 'raw Haste, half-sister to Delay!'" How sound a critic my
friend was I am unable to say, but he was an extremely amusing one;
overflowing with opinions, theories, and sympathies, with disquisition
and gossip and anecdote. He was a shade too sentimental for my own
sympathies, and I fancied he was rather too fond of superfine
discriminations and of discovering subtle intentions in shallow places.
At moments, too, he plunged into the sea of metaphysics, and floundered a
while in waters too deep for intellectual security. But his abounding
knowledge and happy judgment told a touching story of long attentive
hours in this worshipful company; there was a reproach to my wasteful
saunterings in so devoted a culture of opportunity. "There are two
moods," I remember his saying, "in which we may walk through
galleries--the critical and the ideal. They seize us at their pleasure,
and we can never tell which is to take its turn. The critical mood,
oddly, is the genial one, the friendly, the condescending. It relishes
the pretty trivialities of art, its vulgar cleverness, its conscious
graces. It has a kindly greeting for anything which looks as if,
according to his light, the painter had enjoyed doing it--for the little
Dutch cabbages and kettles, for the taper fingers and breezy mantles of
late-coming Madonnas, for the little blue-hilled, pastoral, sceptical
Italian landscapes. Then there are the days of fierce, fastidious
longing--solemn church feasts of the intellect--when all vulgar effort
and all petty success is a weariness, and everything but the best--the
best of the best--disgusts. In these hours we are relentless aristocrats
of taste. We will not take Michael Angelo for granted, we will not
swallow Raphael whole!"

The gallery of the Uffizi is not only rich in its possessions, b