their
fabled deities, whose tranquil beauty forms so soothing a contrast to
mortal toils.

I have observed this calmness of expression in the faces of many of the
most celebrated statues of antiquity, in the Aristides at Naples, I
remember being struck with it, and noticing that he who was banished
through the envy excited by his being styled the Just, was represented
as unmoved as if the injustice of his countrymen no more affected the
even tenour of his mind, than the passions of mortals disturb those of
the mythological divinities of the ancients.

A long residence in Italy, and a habit of frequenting the galleries
containing the finest works of art there, engender a love of sculpture
and painting, that renders it not only a luxury but almost a necessary
of life to pass some hours occasionally among the all but breathing
marbles and glorious pictures bequeathed to posterity by the mighty
artists of old. I love to pass such hours alone, or in the society of
some one as partial, but more skilled in such studies than myself; and
such a companion I have found in the Baron de Cailleux, an old
acquaintance, and now Under-Director of the Musee, whose knowledge of
the fine arts equals his love for them.

The contemplation of the _chefs-d'oeuvre_ of the old masters begets a
tender melancholy in the mind, that is not without a charm for those
addicted to it. These stand the results of long lives devoted to the
developement of the genius that embodied these inspirations, and left
to the world the fruit of hours of toil and seclusion,--hours snatched
from the tempting pleasures that cease not to court the senses, but
which they who laboured for posterity resisted. The long vigils, the
solitary days, the hopes and fears, the fears more frequent than the
hopes, the depression of spirits, and the injustice or the indifference
of contemporaries, endured by all who have ever devoted their lives to
art, are present to my mind when I behold the great works of other
times.

What cheered these men of genius during their toils and enabled them to
finish their glorious works? Was it not the hope that from posterity
they would meet with the admiration, the sympathy, denied them by their
contemporaries?--as the prisoner in his gloomy dungeon, refused all
pity, seeks consolation by tracing a few lines on its dreary walls, in
appeal to the sympathy of some future inhabitant who may be doomed to
take his place.

I seem to be paying a por