servation! I gather with every glance some
hint for light, for colour, or relief! When I get home, I pour out my
treasures into the lap of toy Madonna. Oh, I am not idle! _Nulla dies
sine linea_."

I was introduced in Florence to an American lady whose drawing-room had
long formed an attractive place of reunion for the foreign residents. She
lived on a fourth floor, and she was not rich; but she offered her
visitors very good tea, little cakes at option, and conversation not
quite to match. Her conversation had mainly an aesthetic flavour, for
Mrs. Coventry was famously "artistic." Her apartment was a sort of Pitti
Palace _au petit pied_. She possessed "early masters" by the dozen--a
cluster of Peruginos in her dining-room, a Giotto in her boudoir, an
Andrea del Sarto over her drawing-room chimney-piece. Surrounded by
these treasures, and by innumerable bronzes, mosaics, majolica dishes,
and little worm-eaten diptychs covered with angular saints on gilded
backgrounds, our hostess enjoyed the dignity of a sort of high-priestess
of the arts. She always wore on her bosom a huge miniature copy of the
Madonna della Seggiola. Gaining her ear quietly one evening, I asked her
whether she knew that remarkable man, Mr. Theobald.

"Know him!" she exclaimed; "know poor Theobald! All Florence knows him,
his flame-coloured locks, his black velvet coat, his interminable
harangues on the beautiful, and his wondrous Madonna that mortal eye has
never seen, and that mortal patience has quite given up expecting."

"Really," I cried, "you don't believe in his Madonna?"

"My dear ingenuous youth," rejoined my shrewd friend, "has he made a
convert of you? Well, we all believed in him once; he came down upon
Florence and took the town by storm. Another Raphael, at the very least,
had been born among men, and the poor dear United States were to have the
credit of him. Hadn't he the very hair of Raphael flowing down on his
shoulders? The hair, alas, but not the head! We swallowed him whole,
however; we hung upon his lips and proclaimed his genius on the house-
tops. The women were all dying to sit to him for their portraits and be
made immortal, like Leonardo's Joconde. We decided that his manner was a
good deal like Leonardo's--mysterious, and inscrutable, and fascinating.
Mysterious it certainly was; mystery was the beginning and the end of it.
The months passed by, and the miracle hung fire; our master never
produced his