especially, in gentlemanly society, with every comfort and accommodation
amidst the rudest rocks and in the region of perpetual snow. The thought
that I was sleeping in a convent and occupied the bed of no less a person
than Napoleon, that I was in the highest inhabited spot in the old world
and in a place celebrated in every part of it, kept me awake some time."
As a contrast to this, I may quote here an extract from a letter written
to me last year by his grandson Ernest, of whom the reader will hear more
presently. The passage runs: "I went up to the Great St Bernard and saw
the dogs." In due course Mr Pontifex found his way into Italy, where the
pictures and other works of art--those, at least, which were fashionable
at that time--threw him into genteel paroxysms of admiration. Of the
Uffizi Gallery at Florence he writes: "I have spent three hours this
morning in the gallery and I have made up my mind that if of all the
treasures I have seen in Italy I were to choose one room it would be the
Tribune of this gallery. It contains the Venus de' Medici, the
Explorator, the Pancratist, the Dancing Faun and a fine Apollo. These
more than outweigh the Laocoon and the Belvedere Apollo at Rome. It
contains, besides, the St John of Raphael and many other _chefs-d'oeuvre_
of the greatest masters in the world." It is interesting to compare Mr
Pontifex's effusions with the rhapsodies of critics in our own times. Not
long ago a much esteemed writer informed the world that he felt "disposed
to cry out with delight" before a figure by Michael Angelo. I wonder
whether he would feel disposed to cry out before a real Michael Angelo,
if the critics had decided that it was not genuine, or before a reputed
Michael Angelo which was really by someone else. But I suppose that a
prig with more money than brains was much the same sixty or seventy years
ago as he is now.

Look at Mendelssohn again about this same Tribune on which Mr Pontifex
felt so safe in staking his reputation as a man of taste and culture. He
feels no less safe and writes, "I then went to the Tribune. This room is
so delightfully small you can traverse it in fifteen paces, yet it
contains a world of art. I again sought out my favourite arm chair which
stands under the statue of the 'Slave whetting his knife' (L'Arrotino),
and taking possession of it I enjoyed myself for a couple of hours; for
here at one glance I had the 'Madonna del Cardellino,' Pope Julius II