glittering blades came into competition with it, I was astonished to see

how handsome it was. To this day my new hats look better out of the shop

than they did in it with other new hats. It begins to dawn upon me, now,

that possibly, what I have been taking for uniform ugliness in the

galleries may be uniform beauty after all. I honestly hope it is, to

others, but certainly it is not to me. Perhaps the reason I used to

enjoy going to the Academy of Fine Arts in New York was because there

were but a few hundred paintings in it, and it did not surfeit me to go

through the list. I suppose the Academy was bacon and beans in the

Forty-Mile Desert, and a European gallery is a state dinner of thirteen

courses. One leaves no sign after him of the one dish, but the thirteen

frighten away his appetite and give him no satisfaction.

There is one thing I am certain of, though. With all the Michael

Angelos, the Raphaels, the Guidos and the other old masters, the sublime

history of Rome remains unpainted! They painted Virgins enough, and

popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough, to people Paradise, almost,

and these things are all they did paint. "Nero fiddling o'er burning

Rome," the assassination of Caesar, the stirring spectacle of a hundred

thousand people bending forward with rapt interest, in the coliseum, to

see two skillful gladiators hacking away each others' lives, a tiger

springing upon a kneeling martyr--these and a thousand other matters

which we read of with a living interest, must be sought for only in

books--not among the rubbish left by the old masters--who are no more, I

have the satisfaction of informing the public.

346

The Innocents Abroad