disturbed by the blows of the wrestlers in the same room, and hearkens with an attentive impatience, such as one has often felt when unable to distinguish the words one wishes to repeat.  You really then do not seem as if you were alone in this tribune, so animated is every figure, so full of life and soul:  yet I commend not the representing of St Catharine with leering eyes, as she is here painted by Titian; that it is meant for a portrait, I find no excuse; some character more suited to the expression should have been chosen; and if it were only the picture of a saint, that expression was strangely out of character.  An anachronism may be found in the Tobit over the door too, by acute observers, who will deem it ill-managed to paint the cross in the clouds, where it is an old testament story, and that story apocryphal beside; might I add, that Guido’s meek Madonna, so divinely contrasted to the other women in the room, loses something of dignity by the affected position of the thumbs.  I think I might leave the tribune without a word said of the St. John by Raphael, which no words are worthy to extol:  ’tis all sublimity; and when I look on it I feel nothing but veneration pushed to astonishment.  Unlike the elegant figure of the Baptist at Padua, covered with glass, and belonging to a convent of friars, who told me, and truly, That it had no equal; it is painted by Guido with every perfection of form and every grace of expression.  I agree with them it has no equal; but in the tribune at Florence maybe found its superior.

We were next conducted to the Niobe, who has an apartment to herself:  and now, thought I, dear Mrs. Siddons has never seen this figure:  but those who can see it or her, without emotions equally impossible to contain or to suppress, deserve the fate of Niobe, and have already half-suffered it.  Their hearts and eyes are stone.

Nothing is worth speaking of after this Niobe!  Her beauty! her maternal anguish! her closely-clasped Chloris! her half-raised head, scarcely daring to deprecate that vengeance of which she already feels such dreadful effects!  What can one do

    But drop the shady curtain on the scene,

and run to see the portraits of those artists who have exalted one’s ideas of human nature, and shewn what man can perform.  Among these worthies a British eye soon distinguishes Sir Joshua Reynolds; a citizen of the world fastens his to Leonardo da Vinci.

I have been out to dinner in the country near Prato, and what a charming, what a delightful thing is a nobleman’s seat near Florence!  How cheerful the society! how splendid the climate! how wonderful the prospects in this glorious country!  The Arno rolling before his house, the Appenines rising behind it! a sight of fertility enjoyed by its inhabitants, and a view of such defences to their property as nature alone can bestow.