to this wizard look; but in any garb his tall spare figure and fine head, with its enthusiastic, ascetic features, would be remarkable. He is strikingly like the portraits of John Locke the Philosopher. We went early on one of his public days, and saw such drawings and designs as were on the easels, and when the crowd began to arrive, retired to the ante-room, and quietly looked over a portfolio of engravings from his designs from the life of Christ. In the studio was one painting whose subject I had never before seen attempted-the disappearance of the Saviour from those who sought to throw Him down headlong from the rock. He is represented as miraculously upborne on air passing over the edge of the precipice, while they with faces full of malignity grope about with their hands like people in the dark. It reminded me of drawings by Albert Durer.

Landscape-painters of course abound, as well they may,

The Campagna lies before them, with its long ranges of stately aqueducts; beyond are the Latin and Sabine hills bathed in sunshine, with their delicate varied outline melting blue into the horizon, and Tivoli or Frascati glittering upon their slopes, seen as through an atmosphere of clear water,

'Like an eagle's nest, hangs on the crest

Of purple Apennine.'

And where some glorious ruin fills up the foreground, and the blue sky looks doubly blue through its broken arches, you may imagine what scenes there are for the painters.

We spent one delightful afternoon with a French lady, who has met with some strange adventures in her artist life. One autumn she passed almost alone in a cabin on the Pyrenees for the sake of the scenery, living on such provision as the shepherds brought her, until, as the season advanced, and the wolves and bears began to howl round her at night, the shepherds went down with

their flocks into the valleys, and she and her companion were also forced to depart. Every summer she takes up her quarters in some beautiful district of Italy, caring for no discomforts or seclusion, and passing her time in out-of-doors painting, and when winter comes she returns to Rome to practise her art under shelter; and this is I imagine, the general practice of the landscape-painters. The most impressive work of art we have seen by s modern sculptor is Tenerani's Angel of Judgment. There is a brooding awe about this statue which is not to be described, like that of the Egyptian sphynxes. The mighty angel sits upon his throne waiting for the end of time, when the trumpet in his hand is to be blown, and usher in eternity. But I will not tell you about in dividual pictures and statues, as even the best descriptions that can be written can give but a vague idea of what they really are, and will try to describe a sculptor's studio instead.

The entrance to these studios is generally in some quiet street or piazza, from which they are divided by great folding-doors like those of a coach-house. You push open a little wicket, and step from the quiet street into a quieter world within, where some bearded artist or artist's assistant in a paper cap is chipping away at the white marble, or busy with his modelling clay. Our own sculptor, Gibson, was the first whom we visited. The door from the street introduced us to a large whitewashed building, not unlike a barn, where right and left stood the clay models of statues, groups, busts, and bas-reliefs in picturesque ranks. The marble copies of some of these I had seen when a child in a sculpture-gallery in England, and it was almost like the coming back of a dream to see them again here. Passing through them, we entered a little garden or court-yard leading to two other studios. A tiny fountain faced the open door, s little overflowing bason in a niche of the ivied wall be

fore us, with its margin overhung with the beautiful maiden-hair fern which fringes all these Italian fountains. Among the acanthus leaves by the pathway lay two or three statues blocked out in the marble and rejected for some flaw in the material. They looked like knights in armour, the chisel marks turning into scales for the coat of mail. They lay near the door of a studio, where the colossal clay model of a statue of Sir Robert Peel was being built up, and where on a pedestal was an almost finished ideal head of Amor-subjects are oddly brought together in a sculptor's studio. This was one of the master's workrooms, and in a little wooden frame on the wall hung an etching of one of the royal children, etched and given to him by the queen.

The third and largest studio contained models of the sculptor's principal works, and some finished, or almost finished, statues; among the latter the beautiful cupid disguised as a shepherd, which has been so often repeated. The idea was suggested by the first lines of Tasso's Aminta, which are so pretty they ought to be sculptured on the pedestal. In a little room within was a Narcissus gazing into the stream, and a veiled figure, which we all felt to be a human skeleton.

The sculptor was out when we first arrived, but his chief assistant, a courteous Italian, took us round. His ostensible employment was upon the clay model of Sir Robert Peel, but as it was a festa, and the other workmen were out taking their pleasure, I suppose it was for his pleasure he worked-at least we hoped so, for, although he walked about with a piece of clay in his hand, and now and then stuck on a bit, like a swallow building her nest, not much was done to Sir Robert while we were on the premises.

Just as we were departing Mr. Gibson came in. He is rather under the middle size, spare, and shrewd-looking, the last person in the world to suspect of being the

modeller of Love and the Graces, and yet a very uncommon-looking person. On a subsequent visit he admitted us to his private work-room, a little secluded nook reached by some steps from one of the great studios, and there we saw how a bas-relief is first designed. The first design of all is drawn on paper, the first model is constructed in wet clay on a large slate, and fashioned with a little wooden pointer. The subject in hand was Phaeton in the Chariot of the Sun when the horses first become unmanageable. The companion model, the hours leading out the horses of the sun, was finished, and full of life and beauty. The winged hours, half running, half flying, dragged along by the prancing horses, are most lovely-as buoyant as Guido's, and more elegant, although the artist did call one of them a romp.

The horses in Guido's Aurora, as you know by your pretty cameo, have no harness, and are only connected with the chariot by the reins which Apollo holds. Mr. Gibson's are carefully arrayed, and he told us he had studied the harness and all practical details of the ancient chariots from the pictures of them on the Etruscan

vases.

In some studios, but not in Mr. Gibson's, you see whole shelves full of tiny clay models of statues and groups, in which sometimes the same idea had been tried in twenty different ways before it was fully developed. This is like seeing a painter's sketch-book, and Amy and I always enjoy looking at these little figures. We have perhaps seen most of the German artists, and they are our favourites; but there is one English sculptor, Mr. Gott, who has devoted himself to the sculpture of animals, whose story will be particularly interesting to such a lover of dogs as yourself, so you shall have it as he told it to us, though I am afraid I cannot tell it you as simply and touchingly as he did. How I should like to bring you one of his charming little statuettes !—a

group

bl

greyhounds at play, or a panther stealing grapes, and threatened by the faun, who is their rightful owner.

The sculptor's talent was turned to this line of art by an accident. He was a student of the Royal Academy, and that institution not being in funds to send him out to Rome at the time he gained the gold medal, Sir Thomas Laurence generously sent him out at his own expense, advancing the sum which he must have waited two years for from the Academy. He arrived in the unhealthy season, and fell dangerously ill of the fever of the country, and it was not a very auspicious beginning to find himself ill and alone in a strange land. He had, however, one friend, who came to see him one day during his slow recovery accompanied by a very beautiful Italian greyhound; and after the friend and his dog departed, though still very weak, he amused himself by trying to model the creature, and made so pretty a thing of it, that his friend, on seeing it, sent him the greyhound next day in a basket with all her puppies, and they found him employment and amusement during his convalescence. Soon after, his kind friend brought a lady to see what he had done, whose name he did not hear, but who said to him on taking leave, 'To-day an old woman has been to see you, to-morrow she will bring a young man ;' and, as Mr. Gott said in telling his story, 'The old lady was the Duchess of Devonshire, and the young man her son, and I have never wanted employment since.'

One of the most beautiful things we saw by him was a monument for an American gentleman, who had himself given the commission. It represented his dog, a splendid Newfoundland, mourning over his grave, and the expression of grief in the animal's face and attitude, is as touching as that of Landseer's mourning shepherd's dog. This is at all events a new idea for a monument, and a charming contrast to that of the Princess Odescalchi, in a church not very far from Mr. Gott's studio, where a