When I made Macdonald’s acquaintance I was a girl of about seventeen, and he at the very beginning of his artistic career; but he had an expression of power and vivid intelligence which foretold his future achievements in the exquisite art to which he devoted himself.

When next I met Macdonald it was after a long lapse of time, in 1846, in Rome.  Thither he had gone to study his divine art, and there he had remained for a number of years in the exercise of it.  He was now the Signor Lorenzo of the Palazzo Barberini, the most successful and celebrated maker of busts, probably, in Rome, having achieved fame, fortune, the favor of the great, and the smiles of the fair, of the most fastidious portion of the English society that makes its winter season in Italy.  He dined several times at our house (I was living with my sister and her husband); under his guidance we went to see the statutes of the Vatican by torchlight; and he came out once or twice in the summer of that year to visit us at our villa at Frascati.

I returned to Rome in 1852, and saw Macdonald frequently, in his studio, in our own house, and in general society; and shortly before leaving Rome I met him at dinner at Mrs. Archer Clive’s (the authoress of “Paul Ferrol").  I had a nosegay of snowdrops in the bosom of my dress, and Macdonald, who sat next me, observed that they reminded him of Scotland, that he had never seen one in all the years he had passed in Italy, and did not even know that they grew there.

The next day I went to the gardener of the Villa Medici, an old friend of mine, and begged him to procure a pot of snowdrops for me, which I carried to Macdonald’s studio, thinking an occasional reminiscence of his own northern land, which he had not visited for years, not a bad element to infuse into his Roman life and surroundings.  Macdonald’s portraits are generally good likenesses, sufficiently idealized to be also good works of art.  In statuary he never accomplished any thing of extraordinary excellence.  I think the “Ulysses Recognized by his Dog” his best performance in sculpture.  His studio was an extremely interesting place of resort, from the portraits of his many remarkable sitters with which it was filled.

I met dear old Macdonald, in the winter of 1873, creeping in the sun slowly up the Pincio as I waddled heavily down it (Eheu!), his snow-white hair and moustache making his little-altered and strongly marked features only more striking.  I visited his studio and found there, ardently and successfully creating immortal gods, a handsome, pleasing youth, his son, inheriting his father’s genius, and, strange to say, his broadest of Scotch accents, though he had himself never been out of Rome, where he was born.