dy."

Messer Neri did not take his seat at the counter, but, after a pause,
and with some solemnity, drew a curtain of dark brocade which had been
spread across one end of the closet, and displayed his new purchase.

"I have it from the king, for the settling of a debt of a thousand
crowns contracted with my father, when he was Duke of Calabria," said
the banker, with due appreciation of the sum. "'Tis said they found it
among the ruins of that famous palace of the Emperor Tiberius of which
Tacitus has told us."

The two marble figures, to which time and a long sojourn underground
had given a brownish yellow colour, reddish in places with rust stains,
stood out against a background of Flemish tapestry, whose emaciated
heads of kings and thin bodies of warrior saints made a confused pattern
on the general dusky blue and green. The group was in wonderful
preservation: the figure of Bacchus intact, that of the young faun
lacking only the arm, which had evidently been freely extended.

It exists in many repetitions and variations in most of our museums; a
work originally of the school of Praxiteles, but in none of the copies
handed to us of excellence sufficient to display the hand of the
original sculptor. Besides, we have been spoilt by familiarity with an
older and more powerful school, by knowledge of a few great masterpieces,
for complete appreciation of such a work. But it was different four
hundred years ago; and Domenico Neroni stood long and entranced before
the group. The principal figure embodied all those beauties which he had
been striving so hard to understand: it was, in the most triumphant
manner, the absolute reverse of the figures of Donatello.

The young god was represented walking with leisurely but vigorous step,
supporting himself upon the shoulder of the little satyr as the vine
supports itself, with tendrils trailed about branches and trunk, on the
propping tree from which the child Ampelos took his name. Like the head
with its elaborately dressed curls, the beautiful body had an ampleness
and tenderness that gave an impression almost womanly till you noticed
the cuirass-like sit of the chest on the loins, and the compressed
strength of the long light thighs. The creature, as you looked at him,
seemed to reveal more and more, beneath the roundness and fairness of
surface, the elasticity and strength of an athlete in training. But when
the eye was not exploring the delicate, hard, and yet supple d