t it on fire, for which
exploit the "learned and judicious Bianchi," as Smollett called him in
his first edition, was sent to prison for life. The Arrotino which
Smollett so greatly admired, and which the delusive Bianchi declared to
be a representation of the Augur Attus Naevius, is now described as "A
Scythian whetting his knife to flay Marsyas."

Kinglake has an amusingly cynical passage on the impossibility of
approaching the sacred shrines of the Holy Land in a fittingly
reverential mood. Exactly the same difficulty is experienced in
approaching the sacred shrines of art. Enthusiasm about great artistic
productions, though we may readily understand it to be justifiable, is
by no means so easily communicable. How many people possessing a real
claim to culture have felt themselves puzzled by their insensibility
before some great masterpiece! Conditions may be easily imagined in
which the inducement to affect an ecstasy becomes so strong as to prove
overpowering. Many years ago at Florence the loiterers in the Tribuna
were startled by the sudden rush into the place of a little man whose
literary fame gave him high claims to intuitive taste. He placed
himself with high clasped hand before the chief attraction in that room
of treasures. "There," he murmured, "is the Venus de Medicis, and here
I must stay--for ever and for ever." He had scarcely uttered these
words, each more deeply and solemnly than the preceding, when an
acquaintance entered, and the enthusiast, making a hasty inquiry if
Lady So-and-So had arrived, left the room not to return again that
morning. Before the same statue another distinguished countryman used
to pass an hour daily. His acquaintance respected his raptures and kept
aloof; but a young lady, whose attention was attracted by sounds that
did not seem expressive of admiration, ventured to approach, and found
the poet sunk in profound, but not silent, slumber. From such
absurdities as these, or of the enthusiast who went into raptures about
the head of the Elgin Ilissos (which is unfortunately a headless
trunk), we are happily spared in the pages of Smollett. In him complete
absence of gush is accompanied by an independent judgement, for which
it may quite safely be claimed that good taste is in the ascendant in
the majority of cases.

From Florence Smollett set out in October 1764 for Siena, a distance of
forty-two miles, in a good travelling coach; he slept there, and next
day, seven and a hal