tion of the debt due by posterity to those who
laboured long and painfully for it, when I stand rapt in admiration
before the works of the great masters of the olden time, my heart
touched with a lively sympathy for their destinies; nor can I look on
the glorious faces or glowing landscapes that remain to us, evincing
the triumph of genius over even time itself, by preserving on canvass
the semblance of all that charmed in nature, without experiencing the
sentiment so naturally and beautifully expressed in the celebrated
picture, by Nicolas Poussin, of a touching scene in Arcadia, in which
is a tomb near to which two shepherds are reading the inscription. "I,
too, was an Arcadian."

Yes, that which delighted the artists of old, they have transmitted to
us with a tender confidence that when contemplating these bequests we
would remember with sympathy that they, like us, had felt the charms
they delineated.

CHAPTER XIII.

Went to see the Hotel d'Orsay, to-day. Even in its ruin it still
retains many of the vestiges of its former splendour. The _salle a
manger_, for the decoration of which its owner bought, and had conveyed
from Rome, the columns of the Temple of Nero, is now--hear it, ye who
have taste!--converted into a stable; the _salons_, once filled with
the most precious works of art, are now crumbled to decay, and the vast
garden where bloomed the rarest exotics, and in which were several of
the statues that are now in the gardens of the Tuileries, is now turned
into paddocks for horses.

It made me sad to look at this scene of devastation, the result of a
revolution which plunged so many noble families from almost boundless
wealth into comparative poverty, and scattered collections of the works
of art that whole lives were passed in forming. I remember Mr.
Millingen, the antiquary, telling me in Italy that when yet little more
than a boy he was taken to view the Hotel d'Orsay, then one of the most
magnificent houses in Paris, and containing the finest collection of
pictures and statues, and that its splendour made such an impression on
his mind that he had never forgotten it.

With an admirable taste and a princely fortune, Count d'Orsay spared
neither trouble nor expense to render his house the focus of all that
was rich and rare; and, with a spirit that does not always animate the
possessor of rare works of art, he opened it to the young artists of
the day, who were permitted to study in its galler