such as one has
often felt when unable to distinguish the words one wishes to repeat.
You really then do not seem as if you were alone in this tribune, so
animated is every figure, so full of life and soul: yet I commend not
the representing of St Catharine with leering eyes, as she is here
painted by Titian; that it is meant for a portrait, I find no excuse;
some character more suited to the expression should have been chosen;
and if it were only the picture of a saint, that expression was
strangely out of character. An anachronism may be found in the Tobit
over the door too, by acute observers, who will deem it ill-managed to
paint the cross in the clouds, where it is an old testament story, and
that story apocryphal beside; might I add, that Guido's meek Madonna, so
divinely contrasted to the other women in the room, loses something of
dignity by the affected position of the thumbs. I think I might leave
the tribune without a word said of the St. John by Raphael, which no
words are worthy to extol: 'tis all sublimity; and when I look on it I
feel nothing but veneration pushed to astonishment. Unlike the elegant
figure of the Baptist at Padua, covered with glass, and belonging to a
convent of friars, who told me, and truly, That it had no equal; it is
painted by Guido with every perfection of form and every grace of
expression. I agree with them it has no equal; but in the tribune at
Florence maybe found its superior.

We were next conducted to the Niobe, who has an apartment to herself:
and now, thought I, dear Mrs. Siddons has never seen this figure: but
those who can see it or her, without emotions equally impossible to
contain or to suppress, deserve the fate of Niobe, and have already
half-suffered it. Their hearts and eyes are stone.

Nothing is worth speaking of after this Niobe! Her beauty! her maternal
anguish! her closely-clasped Chloris! her half-raised head, scarcely
daring to deprecate that vengeance of which she already feels such
dreadful effects! What can one do

But drop the shady curtain on the scene,

and run to see the portraits of those artists who have exalted one's
ideas of human nature, and shewn what man can perform. Among these
worthies a British eye soon distinguishes Sir Joshua Reynolds; a citizen
of the world fastens his to Leonardo da Vinci.

I have been out to dinner in the country near Prato, and what a
charming, what a delightful thing is a nobleman's seat near Florence!
How