ice. Had Shakspeare
no _esprit_?' asked Caper.

'Shakspeare was a Frenchman,' replied Rocjean.

'We--ll!'

'Prove to me that he was not?'

'Prove to me that he was!'

'Certainly. The family of Jacques Pierre was as certainly French as
Raimond de Rocjean's. Jacques Pierre became Shakspeare at once, on
emigrating to England, and the 'Immortal Williams,' recognizing the
advantages to a poor man of living in a country where only the guineas
dance, took up his abode there and made the music for the money to jump
into his pockets.'

'Very ingenious. But in relation to Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson,
and--as we are in Italy--Rogers?'

'_Mon ami_, if you seriously prefer ice-cream and trifle to venison and
_dindon aux truffes_, choose. If either one of the four poets--I do not
include Rogers among poets--ever conceived in his mind, and then
produced on paper, a work, composed from his memory, of things terrible
in nature, more sublime than Dante's _Inferno_, I will grant you that he
had _esprit_ and imagination; otherwise, not. It is of the English as a
nation, however, that I make my broad and sweeping assertion, one that
was fixed in my mind yesterday, when I saw a well-dressed and
well-_educated_ Englishman deliberately pick up a stone, knock off the
head of a figure carved on a sarcophagus, found in one of those
newly-discovered tombs on the Via Latina, and put the broken head in his
pocket.... What man, with one grain of _esprit_ or imagination in his
head, would mutilate a work of ancient art, solely that he might possess
a piece of stone, when memory had already placed the entire work forever
in his mind. _Basta_! enough. Look at the effect of the sunlight on the
Albanian mountains. How proudly Mount Gennaro towers over the desolate
Campagna! Hallo! Von Bluhmen down there is in trouble. Come along.'

Throwing down his umbrella, under which he had been sitting in the
shade, Rocjean grasped the iron-pointed shaft, into which the handle of
the umbrella fitted, and, accompanied by Caper, rushed to the rescue of
the German. It was none too soon. While sketching, a shepherd, with a
very large flock of sheep, had gradually approached nearer and nearer
the spot where the artist was sitting at his task; his dogs, eight or
ten in number, fierce, shaggy, white and black beasts, with slouching
gait and pointed ears and noses, followed near him. As Von Bluhmen paid
no attention to them, the shepherd had wandered off; but o