the
brothers Andreas and Carl Muller. After sitting at the feet of Overbeck
in Rome, it was their privilege to paint the chapel at Remagen on the
Rhine: these frescoes are accepted as among the most beauteous
manifestations of the master's teachings. This brief epitome anticipates
the story of years. In the course of a long life it was the good fortune
of Overbeck to witness the growth into a large tree of the grain of
mustard-seed he had cast into the earth.

The Brethren found congenial habitation in the old Franciscan convent of
Sant' Isidoro on the Pincian Hill. The picturesque monks having been
turned out by Napoleon, the German colony became tenants at a yearly
rental, and held in quietude the dormitories, also larger rooms which
served as studios, until the fall of the First Empire, when the
monastery once more reverted to the Mendicant Friars, by whom it is
still occupied. A few years since, the Superior of the Order politely
showed the present writer over the ecclesiastical establishment, now, as
formerly, devoted to charitable works. Time has brought little change in
the cells, the refectory, or in the large hall used for religious
teaching. Other rooms, great and small, are ranged round a cloister
enclosing a garden still fragrant with orange-blossoms as in the days of
Overbeck and Cornelius. Here, amid sacred associations and venerable
monuments, did these devoted students build up the new art, and when the
day's work was ended, they mounted at eventide the lofty Belvedere,
commanding a panorama of which, even in Rome, are few equals. From
neighbouring campanili, vesper bells sound a chorus in the bright
Italian sky, and beneath the eye stretches, as a prairie of the old
world, the wide Campagna, spanned by broken viaducts and bounded by the
blue Alban hills. Through the panorama winds the golden Tiber, guarded
by the Castle of St. Angelo and St. Peter's, and around and below lie
Monte Mario, the pine-clad Pincian, the Villa Medici, and the ilex
groves of the Ludovisi. The scene was inspiring, yet not without shadow
of melancholy; the Capitol had fallen into the hands of the stranger,
but the spirit of Dante fired the dauntless young men; they turned from
the present to the past, "imagination restored the empire that had been
lost," and though "calamity afflicted the country, they believed that
God had not forsaken the people."

Overbeck is known to have been deeply penetrated by the beauties of the
Itali