“Oh!” said my young lady, with a superb air of omniscience.  “It was all Michael Angelo’s design. The others only tinkered away at it afterwards.”

After receiving this brickbat I took my leave.

To console myself I looked up, during the evening, Michael Angelo’s noble letter about Bramante.

“One cannot deny,” says he, “that Bramante was as excellent in architecture as any one has been from the ancients to now.  He placed the first stone of St. Peter’s, not full of confusion, but clear, neat, and luminous, and isolated all round in such a way that it injured no part of the palace, and was held to be a beautiful thing, as is still apparent, in such a way that any one who has departed from the said order of Bramante, as San Gallo has done, has departed from the truth.”

Michael Angelo did not like San Gallo; neither did he like Bramante-who was his senior by thirty years-but this makes his appreciation of the elder’s work all the more generous.

Tinkered away at it, indeed!

May 21st.

I spent all the morning at work by the open window.

I have a small house in Lingfield Terrace, on the north side of the Regent’s Park, so that my drawing-room, on the first floor, has a southern aspect.  It has been warm and sunny for the past few days, and the elms and plane-trees across the road are beginning to riot in their green bravery, as if intoxicated with the golden wine of spring.  My French window is flung wide open, and on the balcony a triangular bit of sunlight creeps round as the morning advances.  My work-table is drawn up to the window.  I am busy over the first section of my “History of Renaissance Morals,” for which I think my notes are completed.  I have a delicious sense of isolation from the world.  Away over those tree-tops is a faint purpurine pall, and below it lies London, with its strife and its misery, its wickedness and its vanity.  Twenty minutes would take me into the heart of it.  And if I chose I could be as struggling, as wretched, as much imbued with wickedness and vanity as anybody.  I could gamble on the stock exchange, or play the muddy game of politics, or hawk my precious title for sale among the young women of London society.  My Aunt Jessica once told me that London was at my feet.  I am quite content that it should stay there.  I have much the same nervous dread of it as I have of an angry sea breaking in surf on the shingle.  If I ventured out in it I should be tossed hither and thither and broken on the rocks, and I should perish.  I prefer to stand aloof and watch.  If I had a little more of daring in my nature I might achieve something.  I am afraid I am but a waster in the world’s factory; but kind Fate, instead of pitching me on the rubbish-heap, has preserved me, perhaps has set me under a glass case, in her own museum, as a curiosity.  Well, I am happy in my shelter.

I was interrupted in my writing by the entrance of my cook and housekeeper, Antoinette.  She was sorry to disturb me, but did Monsieur like sorrel?  She was preparing some veau a l’oseille for lunch, and Stenson (my man) had informed her that it was disgusting stuff and that Monsieur would not eat it.