We spent an impressive hour in the noble cathedral, where long shafts of tinted light were cleaving through the solemn dimness from the lofty windows and falling on a pillar here, a picture there, and a kneeling worshiper yonder.  The organ was muttering, censers were swinging, candles were glinting on the distant altar and robed priests were filing silently past them; the scene was one to sweep all frivolous thoughts away and steep the soul in a holy calm.  A trim young American lady paused a yard or two from me, fixed her eyes on the mellow sparks flecking the far-off altar, bent her head reverently a moment, then straightened up, kicked her train into the air with her heel, caught it deftly in her hand, and marched briskly out.

We visited the picture-galleries and the other regulation “sights” of Milan—­not because I wanted to write about them again, but to see if I had learned anything in twelve years.  I afterward visited the great galleries of Rome and Florence for the same purpose.  I found I had learned one thing.  When I wrote about the Old Masters before, I said the copies were better than the originals.  That was a mistake of large dimensions.  The Old Masters were still unpleasing to me, but they were truly divine contrasted with the copies.  The copy is to the original as the pallid, smart, inane new wax-work group is to the vigorous, earnest, dignified group of living men and women whom it professes to duplicate.  There is a mellow richness, a subdued color, in the old pictures, which is to the eye what muffled and mellowed sound is to the ear.  That is the merit which is most loudly praised in the old picture, and is the one which the copy most conspicuously lacks, and which the copyist must not hope to compass.  It was generally conceded by the artists with whom I talked, that that subdued splendor, that mellow richness, is imparted to the picture by age.  Then why should we worship the Old Master for it, who didn’t impart it, instead of worshiping Old Time, who did?  Perhaps the picture was a clanging bell, until Time muffled it and sweetened it.

In conversation with an artist in Venice, I asked:  “What is it that people see in the Old Masters?  I have been in the Doge’s palace and I saw several acres of very bad drawing, very bad perspective, and very incorrect proportions.  Paul Veronese’s dogs to not resemble dogs; all the horses look like bladders on legs; one man had a right leg on the left side of his body; in the large picture where the Emperor (Barbarossa?) is prostrate before the Pope, there are three men in the foreground who are over thirty feet high, if one may judge by the size of a kneeling little boy in the center of the foreground; and according to the same scale, the Pope is seven feet high and the Doge is a shriveled dwarf of four feet.”

The artist said: