- began). I
had arrived late in the evening at Florence, and while I finished my
bottle of wine at supper, had fancied that, tired traveller though I was,
I might pay the city a finer compliment than by going vulgarly to bed. A
narrow passage wandered darkly away out of the little square before my
hotel, and looked as if it bored into the heart of Florence. I followed
it, and at the end of ten minutes emerged upon a great piazza, filled
only with the mild autumn moonlight. Opposite rose the Palazzo Vecchio,
like some huge civic fortress, with the great bell-tower springing from
its embattled verge as a mountain-pine from the edge of a cliff. At its
base, in its projected shadow, gleamed certain dim sculptures which I
wonderingly approached. One of the images, on the left of the palace
door, was a magnificent colossus, shining through the dusky air like a
sentinel who has taken the alarm. In a moment I recognised him as
Michael Angelo's _David_. I turned with a certain relief from his
sinister strength to a slender figure in bronze, stationed beneath the
high light loggia, which opposes the free and elegant span of its arches
to the dead masonry of the palace; a figure supremely shapely and
graceful; gentle, almost, in spite of his holding out with his light
nervous arm the snaky head of the slaughtered Gorgon. His name is
Perseus, and you may read his story, not in the Greek mythology, but in
the memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini. Glancing from one of these fine
fellows to the other, I probably uttered some irrepressible commonplace
of praise, for, as if provoked by my voice, a man rose from the steps of
the loggia, where he had been sitting in the shadow, and addressed me in
good English--a small, slim personage, clad in a sort of black velvet
tunic (as it seemed), and with a mass of auburn hair, which gleamed in
the moonlight, escaping from a little mediaeval birretta. In a tone of
the most insinuating deference he asked me for my "impressions." He
seemed picturesque, fantastic, slightly unreal. Hovering there in this
consecrated neighbourhood, he might have passed for the genius of
aesthetic hospitality--if the genius of aesthetic hospitality were not
commonly some shabby little custode, flourishing a calico
pocket-handkerchief and openly resentful of the divided franc. This
analogy was made none the less complete by the brilliant tirade with
which he greeted my embarrassed silence.

"I have known Florence l