ghtful historian of the Italian
painters, you may find not only paintings but a great collection of
sculpture also, a magnificent collection of drawings and jewels,
together with the Archives, the Biblioteca Nazionale, which includes the
Palatine and the Magliabecchian Libraries. It will be best, then, seeing
that a whole lifetime were not enough in which to number such treasures,
to confine ourselves to a short examination of the sculpture, which is
certainly less valuable to us than to our fathers, and to a brief
review, hardly more than a personal impression, of the Italian pictures,
which are its chiefest treasure.

Of the rooms in which are hung the portraits of painters, those
unfortunate self-portraits in which some of the greatest painters have
not without agony realised their own ugliness, exhibiting themselves in
the pose that they have hoped the world would mistake for the very
truth, I say nothing. It is true, the older men, less concerned perhaps
at staring the word in the face, are not altogether unfortunate in their
self-revelation; but consider the portrait of Lord Leighton by
himself,--it must have been painted originally as a signboard for
Burlington House, for the summer exhibition of the Academy there, as who
should say to a discerning public: Here you may have your fill of the
impudent and blatant commonplace you love so much. And if such a thing
is really without its fellow in these embarrassing rooms, where Raphael,
Leonardo, Titian, and Velasquez are shouted down by some forgotten
German, some too well remembered English painter, it is but the perfect
essence of the whole collection, as though for once Leighton had really
understood what was required of him and had done his marvellous best.

It is on the top floor of this palace of Cosimo I, after passing the
busts of the lords and dukes of the Medici family, that one enters the
gallery itself, which, running round three sides of a parallelogram,
opens into various rooms of all shapes and sizes. It was Francesco I,
second Grand Duke of Tuscany, who began to collect here the various
works of art which his predecessors had gathered in their villas and
palaces. To this collection Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, his brother,
added, on his succession to the Grand-Dukedom, the treasures he had
collected in the villa which he had built in Rome, and which still bears
the name of his house. To Cosimo II, it might seem, we owe the covered
way from this Pa