For, scorning to be a burden to his parents, he had
become at Heidelberg tutor to two young German princes,
whom, after living with them at their father’s
house for a year or more, he at last, to his own great
delight, took with him down to Padua, “to perfect
them,” as he wrote home, “according to
his insufficiency, in all princely studies.”
Sidney was now returned to England; but Frank found
friends enough without him, such letters of recommendation
and diplomas did he carry from I know not how many
princes, magnificos, and learned doctors, who had
fallen in love with the learning, modesty, and virtue
of the fair young Englishman. And ere Frank returned
to Germany he had satiated his soul with all the wonders
of that wondrous land. He had talked over the
art of sonneteering with Tasso, the art of history
with Sarpi; he had listened, between awe and incredulity,
to the daring theories of Galileo; he had taken his
pupils to Venice, that their portraits might be painted
by Paul Veronese; he had seen the palaces of Palladio,
and the merchant princes on the Rialto, and the argosies
of Ragusa, and all the wonders of that meeting-point
of east and west; he had watched Tintoretto’s
mighty hand “hurling tempestuous glories o’er
the scene;” and even, by dint of private intercession
in high places, had been admitted to that sacred room
where, with long silver beard and undimmed eye, amid
a pantheon of his own creations, the ancient Titian,
patriarch of art, still lingered upon earth, and told
old tales of the Bellinis, and Raffaelle, and Michael
Angelo, and the building of St. Peter’s, and
the fire at Venice, and the sack of Rome, and of kings
and warriors, statesmen and poets, long since gone
to their account, and showed the sacred brush which
Francis the First had stooped to pick up for him.
And (license forbidden to Sidney by his friend Languet)
he had been to Rome, and seen (much to the scandal
of good Protestants at home) that “right good
fellow,” as Sidney calls him, who had not yet
eaten himself to death, the Pope for the time being.
And he had seen the frescos of the Vatican, and heard
Palestrina preside as chapel-master over the performance
of his own music beneath the dome of St. Peter’s,
and fallen half in love with those luscious strains,
till he was awakened from his dream by the recollection
that beneath that same dome had gone up thanksgivings
to the God of heaven for those blood-stained streets,
and shrieking women, and heaps of insulted corpses,
which he had beheld in Paris on the night of St. Bartholomew.
At last, a few months before his father died, he had
taken back his pupils to their home in Germany, from
whence he was dismissed, as he wrote, with rich gifts;
and then Mrs. Leigh’s heart beat high, at the
thought that the wanderer would return: but,
alas! within a month after his father’s death,
came a long letter from Frank, describing the Alps,
and the valleys of the Waldenses (with whose Barbes
he had had much talk about the late horrible persecutions),