admired, but brought away few impressions of
novelty or pleasure. The objects which principally struck my
capricious and fastidious fancy, were precisely those which passed
unnoticed by every one else, and are not worth recording. In the first
church we visited, I saw a young girl respectably and even elegantly
dressed, in the beautiful costume of the Milanese, who was kneeling on
the pavement before a crucifix, weeping bitterly, and at the same time
fanning herself most vehemently with a large green fan. Another church
(St. Alessandro, I think) was oddly decorated for a Christian temple.
A statue of Venus stood on one side of the porch, a statue of Hercules
on the other. The two divinities, whose attributes could not be
mistaken, had been _converted_ from heathenism into two very
respectable saints. I forget their _christian names_. Nor is this the
most amusing metamorphosis I have seen here. The transformation of two
heathen divinities into saints, is matched by the apotheosis of two
modern sovereigns into pagan deities. On the frieze of the _salle_,
adjoining the amphitheatre, there is a head of Napoleon, which, by the
addition of a beard, has been converted into a Jupiter; and on the
opposite side, a head of Josephine, which, being already beautiful and
dignified, has required no alteration, except in name, to become a
creditable Minerva.

_10th._--At the Brera, now called the "Palace of the Arts and
Sciences," we spent some delightful hours. There is a numerous
collection of pictures by Titian, Guido, Albano, Schidone, the three
Carraccis, Tintoretto, Giorgione, etc. Some old paintings in fresco,
by Luini and others of his age, were especially pointed out to us,
which had been cut from the walls of churches now destroyed. They are
preserved here, I presume, as curiosities, and specimens of the
progress of the arts, for they possess no other merit--none, at least,
that I could discover. Here is the "Marriage of the Virgin," by
Raffaelle, of which I had often heard. It disappointed me at the first
glance, but charmed me at the second, and enchanted me at the third.
The unobtrusive grace and simplicity of Raffaelle do not immediately
strike an eye so unpractised, and a taste so unformed as mine still
is: for though I have seen the best pictures in England, we have there
no opportunity of becoming acquainted with the two divinest masters of
the Italian art, Raffaelle and Correggio. There are not, I conceive,
half a do