with each other, and
"received" on stated evenings in their studios (when mulled claret and
cakes were the only refreshment offered; very bad they were, too), and
migrated in the summer to the mountains near Rome or to Sorrento. In the
winter months their circle was enlarged by a contingent from home. Among
wealthy New Yorkers, it was the fashion in the early fifties to pass a
winter in Rome, when, together with his other dissipations, paterfamilias
would sit to one of the American sculptors for his bust, which accounts
for the horrors one now runs across in dark corners of country
houses,--ghostly heads in "chin whiskers" and Roman draperies.

The son of one of these pioneers, more rich than cultivated, noticed the
other day, while visiting a friend of mine, an exquisite
eighteenth-century bust of Madame de Pompadour, the pride of his
hostess's drawing-room. "Ah!" said Midas, "are busts the fashion again?
I have one of my father, done in Rome in 1850. I will bring it down and
put it in my parlor."

The travellers consulted the residents in their purchases of copies of
the old masters, for there were fashions in these luxuries as in
everything else. There was a run at that time on the "Madonna in the
Chair;" and "Beatrice Cenci" was long prime favorite. Thousands of the
latter leering and winking over her everlasting shoulder, were solemnly
sent home each year. No one ever dreamed of buying an original painting!
The tourists also developed a taste for large marble statues, "Nydia, the
Blind Girl of Pompeii" (people read Bulwer, Byron and the Bible then)
being in such demand that I knew one block in lower Fifth Avenue that
possessed seven blind Nydias, all life-size, in white marble,--a form of
decoration about as well adapted to those scanty front parlors as a steam
engine or a carriage and pair would have been. I fear Bulwer's heroine
is at a discount now, and often wonder as I see those old residences
turning into shops, what has become of the seven white elephants and all
their brothers and sisters that our innocent parents brought so proudly
back from Italy! I have succeeded in locating two statues evidently
imported at that time. They grace the back steps of a rather shabby
villa in the country,--Demosthenes and Cicero, larger than life, dreary,
funereal memorials of the follies of our fathers.

The simple days we have been speaking of did not, however, outlast the
circle that inaugurated them. About 1