In every gallery in Europe there are hideous pictures of blood, carnage, oozing brains, putrefaction—­pictures portraying intolerable suffering—­pictures alive with every conceivable horror, wrought out in dreadful detail—­and similar pictures are being put on the canvas every day and publicly exhibited—­without a growl from anybody—­for they are innocent, they are inoffensive, being works of art.  But suppose a literary artist ventured to go into a painstaking and elaborate description of one of these grisly things—­the critics would skin him alive.  Well, let it go, it cannot be helped; Art retains her privileges, Literature has lost hers.  Somebody else may cipher out the whys and the wherefores and the consistencies of it—­I haven’t got time.

Titian’s Venus defiles and disgraces the Tribune, there is no softening that fact, but his “Moses” glorifies it.  The simple truthfulness of its noble work wins the heart and the applause of every visitor, be he learned or ignorant.  After wearying one’s self with the acres of stuffy, sappy, expressionless babies that populate the canvases of the Old Masters of Italy, it is refreshing to stand before this peerless child and feel that thrill which tells you you are at last in the presence of the real thing.  This is a human child, this is genuine.  You have seen him a thousand times—­you have seen him just as he is here —­and you confess, without reserve, that Titian was a Master.  The doll-faces of other painted babes may mean one thing, they may mean another, but with the “Moses” the case is different.  The most famous of all the art-critics has said, “There is no room for doubt, here—­plainly this child is in trouble.”

I consider that the “Moses” has no equal among the works of the Old Masters, except it be the divine Hair Trunk of Bassano.  I feel sure that if all the other Old Masters were lost and only these two preserved, the world would be the gainer by it.

My sole purpose in going to Florence was to see this immortal “Moses,” and by good fortune I was just in time, for they were already preparing to remove it to a more private and better-protected place because a fashion of robbing the great galleries was prevailing in Europe at the time.

I got a capable artist to copy the picture; Pannemaker, the engraver of Dor’e’s books, engraved it for me, and I have the pleasure of laying it before the reader in this volume.

We took a turn to Rome and some other Italian cities —­then to Munich, and thence to Paris—­partly for exercise, but mainly because these things were in our projected program, and it was only right that we should be faithful to it.

From Paris I branched out and walked through Holland and Belgium, procuring an occasional lift by rail or canal when tired, and I had a tolerably good time of it “by and large.”  I worked Spain and other regions through agents to save time and shoe-leather.