rt has not beaten loudly as he
approached a master of his art? If there be, that man will forever lack
some heart-string, some touch, I know not what, of his brush, some
fibre in his creations, some sentiment in his poetry. When braggarts,
self-satisfied and in love with themselves, step early into the fame
which belongs rightly to their future achievements, they are men
of genius only in the eyes of fools. If talent is to be measured by
youthful shyness, by that indefinable modesty which men born to glory
lose in the practice of their art, as a pretty woman loses hers among
the artifices of coquetry, then this unknown young man might claim to
be possessed of genuine merit. The habit of success lessens doubt; and
modesty, perhaps, is doubt.

Worn down with poverty and discouragement, and dismayed at this moment
by his own presumption, the young neophyte might not have dared to enter
the presence of the master to whom we owe our admirable portrait of
Henry IV., if chance had not thrown an unexpected assistance in his way.
An old man mounted the spiral stairway. The oddity of his dress, the
magnificence of his lace ruffles, the solid assurance of his deliberate
step, led the youth to assume that this remarkable personage must be the
patron, or at least the intimate friend, of the painter. He drew back
into a corner of the landing and made room for the new-comer; looking at
him attentively and hoping to find either the frank good-nature of
the artistic temperament, or the serviceable disposition of those
who promote the arts. But on the contrary he fancied he saw something
diabolical in the expression of the old man's face,--something, I know
not what, which has the quality of alluring the artistic mind.

Imagine a bald head, the brow full and prominent and falling with deep
projection over a little flattened nose turned up at the end like the
noses of Rabelais and Socrates; a laughing, wrinkled mouth; a short
chin boldly chiselled and garnished with a gray beard cut into a point;
sea-green eyes, faded perhaps by age, but whose pupils, contrasting
with the pearl-white balls on which they floated, cast at times
magnetic glances of anger or enthusiasm. The face in other respects
was singularly withered and worn by the weariness of old age, and still
more, it would seem, by the action of thoughts which had undermined both
soul and body. The eyes had lost their lashes, and the eyebrows were
scarcely traced along the projectin