I returned to the drawing-room filled with the blind rage that makes a man curse God and wish that he could die.  The fire was black, and I mechanically took up the poker to stir it.  A tempest of impotent anger shook my soul.  I saw things red before my eyes.  I had an execrable lust to kill.  I was alone amid a multitude of gibbering fiends.  As I stooped before the grate I felt something scrabble my shoulders.  I leapt back with a shriek, and saw standing on the mantel-shelf a black, one-eyed thing regarding me with an expression of infinite malice.  Before I knew what I had done, I had brought the iron down, with all my force, upon its skull, and it had fallen dead at my feet.

Finis coronat opus.

November 22d.

Verona:—­I have abandoned the"History of Renaissance Morals.”  The dog’s-eared MS. and the dusty pile of notes I have shot into a lumber heap in a corner of this room, where I sit and shiver by a little stove.  It is immense, marble, cold, comfortless, suggestive of “the vasty halls of death.”  I have been here a week to-day.  I thought I should find rest.  I should breathe the atmosphere of Italy again.  I should ease my heart among the masterworks of Girolamo dai Libri and Cavazzola, and, in the presence of the blue castellated mountains they loved to paint, my spirit would even be as theirs.  In this old-world city, I fondly imagined, I should forget the Regent’s Park, and attune my mind to the life that once filled its narrow streets.

But nothing have I found save solitude.  I stood to-day before the mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated it with unreasoning hatred.  The Madonna belied the wreath-supported inscription above her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper.  The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot.  The picture was worse than meaningless.  It was insulting.  It drove me out of the Public Gallery.  Outside a grey mist veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling.  I crept home, and for the fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my “History of Renaissance Morals.”  I threw it, with a final curse, into the corner.

I loathe it.  I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals.  I count its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers, cutthroats, and courtesans.  Their hubris has lost its glamour of beauty and has coarsened into vulgar insolence.  They offend me by their riotous swagger, their insistence on the animal joy of living; chiefly by their perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.

Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with colour the grey void of my life.  Whence has come the change?