Legate. What would you have, gentlemen? Biancheria. Eminence! we do not ask more for ourselves, who are Italians, than was graciously conceded to a foreigner.

Legate. The French have it always in their power to do a great deal of mischief; and such is their natural disposition. The tiger in his cage is just as restless as in his wilderness, and his keeper must now and then humour him.

Biancheria. We ask to be protected from no Frenchman upon earth, which would be beyond | any reasonable hope, but only from our accursed Englishman, who, by his pertinacity and obduracy, has proved himself to be made of the same paste as the other, and drawn out of the same oven. Like the other, he would rather put in jeopardy three thousand crowns than distribute a few hundreds in charity among the faithful domestics of your Eminence, and their virtuous wives and amiable children. What hearts, ahime! what hearts these English carry with them about Italy! In fact, Eminence, an Englishman closes his fist on these occasions as firmly as if he were boxing. The main difference is, that on these if he is beaten he has the folly to complain, whereas on the other he would be silent if you had beaten him half into a mummy. Knock out an eye, and he gives you his hand; mistake a picture in selling it to him, and he delivers you over to the executioner.

Scampa. If not quite that, he makes you give back the money; and thus, blemishing your honour, he leaves an incurable wound in the very centre of the heart.

Legate. Gently, good Signor Marchese! such hard thumps on the exterior may produce an effect no less fatal. I should apprehend ossification and aneurism. We must bear with human infirmity. All nations have their customs, all individuals their privileges and foibles. As the English fight best upon the ocean, it is probable and presumable that they see best with their heads under water; which opinion some of the pictures bought by them on dry land, at enormous prices, for their national gallery, seem to confirm. Certainly they little know our usages: but they know incomparably more about theoretical law than about its practical administration. haps, as you suggest, they are somewhat too indifferent to the deferential delicacy of its domestic courtesies. Knowing the weaknesses to which, as children of Adam, we all are liable, I would not animadvert on them severely, nor prejudge them. True it is, the Frenchman is more soci

Per

Biancheria. For my part, I have no complaint to make against him: no Frenchman ever carried off any of my pictures.

Legate. Signor Conte! keep your own secret. Do not imply, as your speech would do, that you never had any worth carrying off.

Corazza. Our Italy would rise up in arms against the despoiler and deflowerer. Your Eminence would issue a rescript, an ordinance we are safe. Ah, Signor Conte! not without an inspiration did you remind his Eminence of our Garisenda, and her maternal leaning toward us. Signor Conte and Signor Marchese would melt Saint Peter and persuade Saint Thomas, when they were stubbornest. I am ready to weep.

Legate. At what, Signor Corazza?

Corazza. Ca! at what? it lies beyond expres

sion.

Legate. Well, in this article of weeping we perhaps may help you.

Corazza (aside). Per Bacco! it grows serious!
Legate. The foreigner threatens .
All. The assassin!

Legate. to send the Process before the Ruota Criminale at Rome, first submitting it to the Pontifical Chancery.

Scampa..Chancery! we are fresh eggs; we are live oysters; we are swallowed up; the Day of Judgment can not piece us again! If anything reasonable had been offered, then indeed who knows? Eminence! only hear the Englishman's proposals! That the pictures should be sent back; true, at the purchaser's charge; but what compensation for losing the sight of our pictures? Pictures that have been hanging in our palaces from time immemorial; pictures that have made men, women, and children, stand breathless under them; pictures that at last were given to the Englishman at his own price; for he would not listen to reason. I told him I had a presentiment of heartbreaking: I clasped my hands: I lifted up my eyes imploringly to the ceiling, until my sighs carried down a cobweb from a highth of twelve braccie, and almost blinded me. I made no complaint; I bring no action for damages. There is one Scampa in the world; only one; here he stands.

Biancheria. Think! figure it! Eminence! he offered us our pictures again, with only one-half of the money! Could a Jew do worse? The Pontifical Chancery and the Ruota Criminale would never tribulate gallant men in this guise. We must go to Rome with sacks in our great coats: and the judges there can smell silver from gold

through a Russia-leather portmanteau, mix it as you will. Here in Bologna the judges are our neighbours, and act like neighbours. No pride, no fastidiousness: they have patience and hear reason. Only one word from your Eminence, and all stands well.

Legate. Reason too is heard at Rome.

Scampa. It goes by the Diligence to the banker's, and (Santa Maria!) makes but a short stay there.

Biancheria. Yes, Eminence! at Rome too they hear reason and have patience: but they require more reason from us, and more patience. Sacks! Eminence! sacks and sacks, Eminence! exterminated mountains! Mexico, Peru, Cordilleras!

Corazza. Is money chaff, Signor Marchese? Signor Conte! is money swept off with the beard and suds at the barber's? To me it does not seem so. I am a poor man, but honest. I work, I work hard; ca! if anyone knew it !

Legate. At what do you work, most respectable Signor Corazza, my most worshipful master?

Corazza. At my business; day after day; all day long. O the life! to gain a crown-piece after years and years, and many and many! To stand and stand, and sigh and sigh, with my hands before me; now straight down, now across; sad variety! Now looking at one Virgin, now at another; now at this Bambino, now at that; never minding me; tiring my heart and tearing it, and gnawing it, summer and winter, spring and autumn; while others are in villa! hosiers and hatters, who can not distinguish a picture from a counterpane, a Porporato from a Pievano. Ca! and these people get more money than they can spend: what livers and brains! what capons! what trout! Their wine comes from twenty miles off; cospetto! One keeps his civetta, another his billiard-table, another his.. what not! Here am I no wine, no billiard, no pallone, no laughing, no noise! The very carts in the streets grumble to be in it at such a season. All I possess of the country is a grillo in a cage of straw. The blessed Saint who lost her eyes.. if she can be said to have lost them when she carried them in a dish.. suffered less than mine did when I lost my Guido.

for dinner: Signor Perotti, Signor Flavio, your Eminence must know him, padrone of the Pelican, says, "Leave that to me." Now Signor Flavio speaks English as well as milord Beron or milord Scacchesperro. "Do you want cash, sir? I will take any bill upon London, two months, three months." O the ingratitude of the canaglia! The pictures are given; thrown away, (do I speak well, Signor Marchese?), packed up, sealed at the custom-house, sent off; Signor Flavio goes along with them, loses his business, his rest, his peace of mind, crosses the Appennines, as Annibal did, and reaches Florence, eviscerated, exossated, with nine great packages! nine! the treasures of Bologna !

Biancheria. We lie near the woods, or we never could have given the empty cases for the money we gave the pictures at.

Scampa. I doubt, after all, whether they will cover the carpenter's bill.

Corazza. Be tranquil, Signor Marchese! I have calculated that they certainly will, if he waits (as usual) a reasonable while for the payment.

Scampa. It was a great inconvenience to me: I made a great sacrifice: I thought of building a palace with the planks. Will your Eminence just look over the ground-plan?

Legate. Prodigiously magnificent elevation! Blessed Saints!

Scampa. One might imagine that a little of the timber would be left. Quite the contrary. I have ruined the way through my estate by the carriage of supplementary loads; and I should not have regretted it if I could have given satisfaction. I am ready to do the like again for anyone who thinks more liberally.

Biancheria. It must be by particular favour, and with strong recommendations, that an Englishman ever enters my house again. My stock of timber was small however, if it had pleased His Beatitude the Holiness of our Lord to equip a galley or two against the Turks or Greeks, I had wherewithall at his service. Now, now indeed, not a stick is left me! not a thorn, not a dead leaf on the floor: the packages took all.

Corazza. Men of humble condition must be cautious in their resentments. My temper is for

Corazza. Providence never abandons the faithful. A Ludovico . . pure, sincere, intact; purest, sincerest, intactest. . but alas! no menestra in pentola; no more menestra than if there were no rice-ground in Lombardy. This I call enduring fatigue, Signor Marchese! This I call sweating, Signor Conte! This I call tribulation, Eminence! Your Eminence can feel all this for us poor people in the trade. Look now! look now! only look! Here comes an Englishman to the Pelican; a milord; a real milord of London. The fame of the finest pieces in the world reaches him on the steps; not mine; I do not say mine; but the pieces of Signor Marchese and Signor Conte, rimbombing through the universe. He hardly asks

Legate. He fancies he has already seen it, my most ornamented friend and worthy patron! His correspondent at Florence assures me, on the authority of the whole Academy, that he has been defrauded.

Biancheria. If this gentleman is a gentleman of the law, he may lie legally: but if he acts merely as a friend, and in private, he acts insidiously. What gentleman in Italy ever took upon himself the business of another, where he fancied the other had been imprudent and might lose by that imprudence, whether life or property? The English alone are discontented with their own dangers, and run into those of other people. They pursue thieves; they mount upon conflagra

tions. Instead of joining the stronger, they join the weaker, subverting the order of things. Even dogs and wolves know better.

Scampa. I am ruined by them; this is all I pretend to know of their doings. Since I sold them my pictures, I am infested and persecuted and worried to death by duns. They belabor and martellate my ears worse than the terza rima of Dante, the next taking up the rhyme of the last. I am not a dealer in pictures: I only sell when anyone takes a fancy to this or that; and merely to show that we in Bologna are as condescending and polite to strangers as the people of Rome or Florence.

Legate. Very proper; but this double baptism of pictures, this dipping of old ones in the font again, and substituting a name the original sponsor never dreamt of giving, this, methinks, Signor Marchese! under correction! is somewhat questionable and exceptionable.

Scampa. Under the correction of your Eminence, bending myself most submissively, I have as much right to call my pictures by what appellation I please as my house-dog. He whose son has been christened by the name of Tommaso, may deem it more pleasurable to his ear, or more conducive to his welfare, or more appertaining to the dignity of his beloved heir, to designate him by that of Pietro or Giovanni. Again, I have as much right to ask a thousand crowns as a hundred. Asking does not cut purses nor force open bankers' desks. Beside, have I ever transgressed by laying claim to infallibility? Only one upon earth is infallible; and he not in pictures: it is aly in things that nobody in this world can comprehend.

Legate. Piously and judiciously spoken. Scampa. Eminence! I am liable to errors; I am frail; I am a man: we are all of us dust; we are all of us ashes; here to-day, there to-morrow: but I stick to my religion; I wear my honour next my heart. I should like to catch this Englishman by twilight: I should like to hear how be would answer an honest man to his face. No subterfuges with me. Accidents have happened; malaria; judgments. Many have fallen sick by holding their noses too close to the ground, like dogs in the grotto at Naples yonder.

Legate. Be calm, Signor Marchese!

Seampa. My blood rises against oppression and injustice. These proud Englishmen shall never govern us. We are under the Church; God be praised! We are under his blessed Saints and your Eminence. Englishmen! what are Englishmen? In their ships they may do something. Give me one, visage to visage in the shaven field, and, capperi! he should soon see who was before tim: ay, capperi! should he. Uh! uh! I almost crack my teeth with my courage.

Legate. Spare them! spare them! good Signor Marchese! they are worth their weight in gold at your age. Let us respect our veterans, so sadly thinned by the enemy.

Legate. You must feel it very comfortable. Scampa. It boils within me.

Legate. Let it; let it; better within than without. Surely it is applicable to pleasanter purposes than broils.

Scampa. Stains upon honour..

Legate. May be covered with blood more easily than washed out with it. You are calmer, Signor Conte! Let me remark to you, then, that the Englishman in question has sent to me an attestation on a certain picture, purporting to bear the seal of our Academy: this seal is declared by one of our own Academicians (now in Florence) to be a forgery.

All. A traitor! a traitor! a traitor to his country!

Biancheria. The Englishman himself forged it. Corazza. The English are capable. I never saw people write with such ease and fluency.

Scampa. Very great forgers; very notorious. Many are hanged for it every year in London; some of the most respectable persons in the whole nation, who spend several thousand dollars a year; milords, bankers, bishops.

Biancheria. Bishops! more shame upon them! Ours in Italy are long-dips; four-and-twenty to the pound; in England they are as substantial as sausages. What the devil should they forge but their credentials?

Scampa. I said, and I repeat it, many English are hanged for it every year; not one Italian. Lord Kenyon, the greatest judge in the kingdom, declared it lawful against an enemy: now Catholics are enemies in the eye of the Anglican Church, and the English laws acknowledge and act upon it; therefore, on their own principles, we may fairly and justifiably be guilty of it, at our good pleasure. Not that we ever are.

Biancheria. A secretary, by inadvertency, may affix a seal to a wrong paper. We cannot look to these bagatelles: we cannot light the taper for all our letters: we have extensive correspondences: a good deal of money comes yearly by this way into the Legations.

Scampa. An easy quiet liberality; some slight preference to the native; a little more regard to his testimony who is a Christian, than to a Quaker's, a Turk's, a Lutheran's, an Anabaptist's, a Free-mason's, may benefit the individual, consolidate the government, and calm those uneasinesses and ranklings which have kept our wretched country

Biancheria, whispering to him. Ohibo! take heed! diamene!

can pay them best: they are idle or at work as we judge proper. Englishmen have long purses, but never hire any help in their anger.

Corazza. Economical indeed! meanspirited creatures!

Biancheria. But they carry sticks, and confound distinctions with them.

Scampa. Bloody rogues are left yet in the Legations; and not all of them on the mountains. Have a care, Eminence! they pretend to love their country. Such folks are always dangerous: their whistle is heard farther than any. We have seen, O Christ! O holy Virgin! . . Surgeon's work does not stand well. I weep at thinking.. my eyes overflow. . I kiss the feet that represent His Holiness.

Legate. Signor Marchese! you overpower me. And, Signor Conte! you also at my other! nay, nay, in the name of . . Cazzo! . . you go too far. I do intreat you to rise up from my feet: your lips make them too hot: they do indeed. Gentlemen, the pleasure of your company has almost caused me to forget that you do me the honour of consulting with me on business of importance. Forgery is really an ugly thing, in my view of the subject. Swindling sounds indifferently. The Academicians of Florence have formally and unanimously decided that your pictures are not only no originals, but are wretched copies. Fifteen names, the names of all present, are subscribed to the declaration, signed by the president, the senator Alessandri! "Siamo di concorde avviso che il primo sia una copia mediocre, &c.: che il secondo appertenga ad un debole imitatore della scuola Bolognese; e gli ultimi due sieno fatti da un cattivo seguace," &c.

Biancheria. Eminence! let the Academicians of Florence look at the pictures that the most liberal and intelligent of our Italian princes (I mean secular; no offence to our Lord and Master His Beatitude) has bought in their own city, and under their own eyes. How happens it that he has friends about him who recommend to him the purchase, at many thousand crowns, of pieces not worth five figs? Domenichinos! Salvators, Leonardos, Murillos! Is the Guido in the Tribuna any Guido at all? Would your Eminence give three crowns for it, out of the frame?

Scampa. Their Domenichino in the same Tribuna, did Domenichino ever see it? However, it is better than a real work of his in the Palazzo Pitti, which the Granduke's purveyors bought for him at the price of fifteen hundred louis. Eminence would you give fifty crowns for it? Our Lord would never have talked a half-minute with such a Magdalen as that: he would have thrown her pot of pomatum in her face.

Corazza. Under favour, how happens it that they recommend to the Granduke restorers and cleaners who never learnt anything of the art, and never attempted it on their own dirt and rags?

Scampa. How happens it that the finest pictures in the world have been ruined within these two years? The friend of His Imperial Highness,

who recommended these rascals and their rubbish, has unquestionably his profits.

Corazza. And why should not we have ours? We who rub nothing out at all, and put little

on ..

Legate... Except in price, most adorned sir. Biancheria. I would not wish my observations to transpire. If the scourers at Florence go on as they have been going on lately, the collections at the gallery and at Pitti will be fit only for the Committee of Taste in London; and the Granduke must have recourse to us for what is unsold in our corridors.

Legate. Sorry am I to understand that so zealous a protector, and so liberal an encourager of the Arts, has fallen among thieves.

Scampa. However he has purchased some fine pictures. Old pencils are redhot iron to young fingers: all are burnt at first.

Biancheria. Unhappily, the two purest and most perfect works of Raffael are transferred from Tuscany to Bavaria: his Bindo Altoviti and his Tempi Madonna.

Legate. Raffael has been surpassed in portraits by Titian and Giorgione. But Tuscany may weep for ever over her loss in the Bindo Altoviti, which I have often seen in the palace where it was painted. Towns, fortresses, provinces, are won, recovered, restored, repurchased: kings will keep Raffaels; kings alone, or higher dignitaries, should possess them.

Scampa. He who would sell his Raffael would sell his child.

Biancheria. Cospetto! thirty.
Scampa. Or his father.

Biancheria. Cappari! All, all, to the last.

Legate. Leonardos, Correggios, rare, very rare: but only one genius ever existed who could unite what is most divine on earth with what is most adorable in heaven. He gives sanctity to her youth, and tenderness to the old man that gazes on her. He purifies love in the virgin's heart; he absorbs it in the mother's.

Corazza. Many allow him the preference over our school.

Legate. Ca! ca! ca! your School! an immondezzaio to a Sistine Chapel.

Scampa. Eminence! in Rome, protected by popes and cardinals, he reached perfection.

Legate. Protected! He walked among saints and prophets, their herald upon earth. What a man! what a man! his shadow in our path will not let lies pass current, nor flattery sink into the breast. No, Marchese! At Rome he thought he could embellish what is most beautiful in sentiment: at Florence, until the scourers brought their pestilence into the city, his genius soared in all its light angelic strength. At Florence he was the interpreter of Heaven: at Rome he was only the conqueror of Michel-Angelo: he had left Paradise, he had entered Eden.

Scampa. In your Rome the great Florentine taught him dignity.

Legate. Strange mistake! Was ever painter so

dignified as Frate Bartolommeo, whom he studied before he went to Rome? In amplitude, in gravity, in majesty, Fra Bartolommeo is much the superior of Michel-Angelo: both want grace: both are defective in composition. These two qualities were in the soul of Raffael: had he looked for them externally, he might have found them on the gates of the Battisterio. I admire and venerate the power of Michel-Angelo: but the boy of Urbino reached the head of this giant at the first throw. He did not strip your skins over your heads to show where your muscles lie; nor throw Hercules into the manger at Bethlehem; nor fall upon Alcmena for Mary.

I know not how it happens, but love of the Arts leads me astray. When persons of intelligence on such subjects are about me, I am apt to prolong the discourse. But the pleasantest day must end; the finest sunset is at last a sunset.

Gentlemen! on the word of a friend, and such I am to all entrusted to my governance, and especially to men of merit, to persons of distinction, true Bolognese, real professors.. Gentlemen! you will find it better to contrive, if possible, that this awkward question do not come before the ordinary tribunals.

Scampa. Eminence! what in God's name can they do against us if we are protected?

Biancheria. The milord erred in his judgment; we did not err in ours. If men are to suffer for errors, which, alas! seems the lot of humanity, let those suffer who do err, by no means those who do not. No. man was ever brave at this embroidery of picture-fancying until he had often pricked his finger. Now I would advise milord to put his between his lips, and not to hold it up in public with a paltry jet bead of blood on it, as if he endured the sufferings of a martyr. We ought to complain; not he. Is it right or reasonable, or according to justice or law, that good quiet Christians, pursuing the steps of their forefathers.. do I say well, Signor Marchese?

Scampa. Capitally! admirably sound argument! touching truth! But I am not to judge.. I am a party, it seems!

Biancheria. That good quiet christians, eccetera; loyal subjects, eccetera; gallant men, men of honour, men of garb, eccetera, eccetera. . should be persecuted and ransacked and trodden upon and torn and worried and dilacerated and devoured by these arrogant insatiable English. Scampa. Bravo! bravo! bravo!

Corazza. Ancora! ancora! bisse, bisse, bisse! Biancheria. These arrogant insatiable English, what would they have? I gave them my flesh and blood; would they seize my bones? Let them, let them! since for even one's bones there is no rest on earth; none whatever; not a pin's point; saving upon the breast of your Eminence. Legate. Ohibo! where is the need of weeping and wailing, Signor Conte?

Biancheria. Magdalen wept and wailed, Peter wept and wailed: but they had gone astray, they had slipped and sidled: I have followed my line

of duty; I have acted consistently; I have gone on as I began. Why should these infuriated monsters run from under the North Pole against me? why be permitted to stroke up, in a manner, my spinal hair from tail to nape in this fashion? merciful Jesu! eradicating, eradicating! flaying, laying. The acquirer of the pictures, he complain too! he complain! after spoiling his own speculation. Had he kept his tongue from ringing, his seven hundred louis, the poor compensation for our master-pieces, would have procured him a seat in the Committee of Taste in London, and every piece would have turned out a miraculous loaf; a Christ in the Garden. What power! what patronage! And they eat, Eminence! they eat; or they are much belied. If another man's macaroni is a foot long, theirs is a yard. Fry, fry, fry, all day: the kitchen hums and buzzes like a spring meadow: it frets and fumes and wheezes with its labour: one cook cannot hear another: you might travel as far as from Bologna to Ancona between the boiled and the roast. And what do we get? at the uttermost the scale of an anchovy, with scarcely oil enough to float it..

Corazza... And perhaps, late in the season, the extremity of a radish, so cursedly tough, you may twist it twenty times round the finger.

Scampa. We are amenable to your Eminence : but what has the Academy of Florence to do with us? Presently, no doubt, we shall be cited before the Committee of Taste on the Thames. Let us discuss a little the qualifications of our future judges, now we have plainly shown what our present are. Has not this glorious Committee paid several thousand louis for a false Correggio, which was offered at Rome heretofore for fifteen crowns, and carried to Milan ere it found so much? Has not this glorious Committee, which snatched so eagerly at a false, rejected a real one at a low price? Have the blockheads not allowed the finest Andrea to slip out of London, and to hang on a banker's wall at Paris? Could they not have bought it at a third less than what the banker paid for it? and will he sell it again for a third more?

Legate. In almost all the works of this otherwise admirable painter there is a vulgarity which repels me.

Biancheria. But what truth, Eminence, what truth!

Legate. The most endearing quality, I perceive, with Signor Conte Biancheria.

Biancheria. It stands indeed high with me. Scampa. There is no answering any of the Count's questions on the Committee of Taste.

Biancheria. The facts are known all over the world. Not a cottage or cavern, not a skiff or felucca, not a gondola or canoe, from Venice to Van Diemen's Land, that does not echo them. Legate. Indeed!

Biancheria. Upon my faith as a Christian!

Scampa. There is a certain duke at Rome, a duke made after buckles were left off, who can