here,
and her Imperial Highness the Princess, and their excellencies the
chamberlains and the footmen? They must have been on their tails many
times a day, that's certain, and must have cut queer figures.

The ball-room is beautiful--all marble, and yet with a comfortable,
cheerful look; the other apartments are not less agreeable, and the
people looked with intense satisfaction at some great lapis-lazuli
tables, which the guide informed us were worth four millions, more or
less; adding with a very knowing look, that they were un peu plus cher
que l'or. This speech has a tremendous effect on visitors, and when we
met some of our steamboat companions in the Park or elsewhere--in so
small a place as this one falls in with them a dozen times a day--"Have
you seen the tables?" was the general question. Prodigious tables are
they, indeed! Fancy a table, my dear--a table four feet wide--a table
with legs. Ye heavens! the mind can hardly picture to itself anything so
beautiful and so tremendous!

There are some good pictures in the palace, too, but not so
extraordinarily good as the guide-books and the guide would have us
to think. The latter, like most men of his class, is an ignoramus,
who showed us an Andrea del Sarto (copy or original), and called it a
Correggio, and made other blunders of a like nature. As is the case in
England, you are hurried through the rooms without being allowed time
to look at the pictures, and, consequently, to pronounce a satisfactory
judgment on them.

In the Museum more time was granted me, and I spent some hours with
pleasure there. It is an absurd little gallery, absurdly imitating the
Louvre, with just such compartments and pillars as you see in the noble
Paris gallery; only here the pillars and capitals are stucco and
white in place of marble and gold, and plaster-of-paris busts of great
Belgians are placed between the pillars. An artist of the country
has made a picture containing them, and you will be ashamed of your
ignorance when you hear many of their names. Old Tilly of Magdeburg
figures in one corner; Rubens, the endless Rubens, stands in the
midst. What a noble countenance it is, and what a manly, swaggering
consciousness of power!

The picture to see here is a portrait, by the great Peter Paul, of one
of the governesses of the Netherlands. It is just the finest portrait
that ever was seen. Only a half-length, but such a majesty, such a
force, such a splendor, such a simplicit