ng the pageant. The Schloss where
this piece was painted is still in existence, and the Grand Duke has
lately erected a wooden roof over the painting, to preserve it from
destruction."

Before leaving Frankfort, Leighton had already interested Steinle in his
projected picture of _Cimabue's Madonna_, and the design for it was made
under Steinle's direction. Under his direct influence, too, and inspired
by Boccaccio, another Florentine picture--a cartoon of its great
plague--was painted. In speaking of the dramatic treatment of its
subject, Mrs. Lang describes "the contrast between the merry revellers
on one side of the picture and the death-cart and its pile of corpses on
the other, while in the centre is the link between the two--a
terror-stricken woman attempting to escape with her baby from the
pestilence-stricken city. We shall look in vain among the President's
later works for any picture with a similar _motif_. In general he shared
Plato's opinion--that violent passions are unsuitable subjects for art;
not so much because the sight of them is degrading, as because what is
at once hideous and transitory in its nature should not be
perpetuated."

[Illustration: SCHEME FOR A PICTURE: THE PLAGUE IN FLORENCE]

We have seen how the spirit and sentiment of Italy continually remained
by the artist in his German studio, and how in Frankfort his artistic
imagination returned again and again to Florence, and to the early
Florentines of his particular adoration--Cimabue and Giotto. The recall
to Italy came inevitably, as Steinle's teaching at last had fully worked
its purpose. Steinle himself counselled the move, and gave his favourite
pupil an introduction to Cornelius in Rome. It was to Rome, therefore,
and not to Florence, that the young artist went--to Rome where sooner or
later the steps of all men who work for art or for religion tend, and
where so few stay. This was in 1852, the year which was represented in
the Commemorative Exhibition at Burlington House by _A Persian Pedlar_,
a small full-length figure of a man in Oriental costume, seated
cross-legged on a divan, with a long pipe in his hand. To 1853 belongs a
_Portrait of Miss Laing_ (Lady Nias), which was shown again at the same
time.

The Rome of the mid-century was Rome at its best, with much artistic
stimulus of the present, as well as of the past. The English colony was
particularly strong. Thackeray was there, moving about after his wont in
the studio