“This meeting annihilated for a moment all the years between the present time and the days of Harrow.  It was a new and inexplicable feeling, like rising from the grave, to me.  Clare, too, was much agitated—­more in appearance than was myself; for I could feel his heart beat to his fingers’ ends, unless, indeed, it was the pulse of my own which made me think so.  He told me that I should find a note from him left at Bologna.  I did.  We were obliged to part for our different journeys, he for Rome, I for Pisa, but with the promise to meet again in spring.  We were but five minutes together, and on the public road; but I hardly recollect an hour of my existence which could be weighed against them.  He had heard that I was coming on, and had left his letter for me at Bologna, because the people with whom he was travelling could not wait longer.

“Of all I have ever known, he has always been the least altered in every thing from the excellent qualities and kind affections which attached me to him so strongly at school.  I should hardly have thought it possible for society (or the world, as it is called) to leave a being with so little of the leaven of bad passions.

“I do not speak from personal experience only, but from all I have ever heard of him from others, during absence and distance.”

* * * * *

After remaining a day at Bologna, Lord Byron crossed the Apennines with Mr. Rogers; and I find the following note of their visit together to the Gallery at Florence:—­

“I revisited the Florence Gallery, &c.  My former impressions were confirmed; but there were too many visiters there to allow one to feel any thing properly.  When we were (about thirty or forty) all stuffed into the cabinet of gems and knick-knackeries, in a corner of one of the galleries, I told Rogers that it ‘felt like being in the watchhouse.’  I left him to make his obeisances to some of his acquaintances, and strolled on alone—­the only four minutes I could snatch of any feeling for the works around me.  I do not mean to apply this to a tete-a-tete scrutiny with Rogers, who has an excellent taste, and deep feeling for the arts, (indeed much more of both than I can possess, for of the FORMER I have not much,) but to the crowd of jostling starers and travelling talkers around me.

“I heard one bold Briton declare to the woman on his arm, looking at the Venus of Titian, ’Well, now, this is really very fine indeed,’—­an observation which, like that of the landlord in Joseph Andrews on ’the certainty of death,’ was (as the landlord’s wife observed) ’extremely true.’

“In the Pitti Palace, I did not omit Goldsmith’s prescription for a connoisseur, viz. ’that the pictures would have been better if the painter had taken more pains, and to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.’”

* * * * *

LETTER 466.  TO MR. MURRAY.