trumpery, inscrutable. Be
this as it may, the fact remains that during the dull months of planning
and putting together this book, I have been haunted, as by a melody, by
the remembrance, the vision, the consciousness of that afternoon, warm
and hazy, of early December, on the battlements of Belcaro castle, when
we looked down over the top of the dense mural crown of sprouting pale
green acorned ilex on to the hills and ravines, with the sere oak-woods
reddened with the faint flush of sun-light, and the vague, white thinned
olives and isolated golden-leaved oaks, and distant solitary belfries
and castles; away towards Siena, grey on the horizon, beneath the grey,
pinked, wet cloud masses, lurid and mysterious like Beccafumi's frescos,
as if the clouds, if one looked at them long, might gather into
clustered angels with palm-shaped wings and flushed faces and reddened
pale locks. Thus have I been haunted by this remembrance, this inner
sight, this single moment continuing, in a way, to exist alongside of so
many and various other moments; so that, when it has come to giving a
name to this book, I find that there is already indissolubly associated
with it, the name of Belcaro.

So far of the title: now of the book itself, of what it is, and why it
is such. When, two summers since, I wrote the last pages of my first
book, it was, in a way, as if I had been working out the plans of
another dead individual. The myself who had, almost as a child, been
insanely bewitched by the composers and singers, the mask actors and
pedants, and fine ladies and fops, the whole ghostly turn-out of the
Italian 18th century; who had, for years, in the bustle of self-culture,
I might almost say, of childish education, never let slip an opportunity
of adding a new microscopic dab of colour to the beloved, quaint, and
ridiculous and pathetic century-portrait which I carried in my mind;
this myself, thus smitten with the Italian 18th century, had already
ceased to exist. Another myself had come instead, to whom this long
accumulated 18th century lore had been bequeathed, but who would never
have taken the pains, or had the patience, to collect it; who carried
out with a sort of filial piety the long cherished plan of making into a
book all that inherited material, seeing the while in this 18th century
lore what the original collector had never guessed: illustrations,
partial explanations, of questions of artistic genesis and evolution,
of artist