ed
Pyramid-Doctor, Signor Splendiano Accoramboni. Michele's cudgelling had
such an effect on him that he fell into a fever. He determined to cure
himself by a remedy which he believed he had discovered. He demanded
pen and ink, and wrote a recipe, in which, by putting down a wrong
fever, he enormously increased the quantity of a very powerful
ingredient; so that as soon as he swallowed the medicine he fell back
upon his pillow and was gone; proving, by his own death, the effect of
this final tincture of his prescribing in the most striking and heroic
manner.

As we have said, all who had previously laughed the most heartily at
Capuzzi, and the most sincerely wished success to the brave Antonio in
his undertaking, were now all compassion for the old man; and the
bitterest blame was laid, not upon Antonio so much as upon Salvator
Rosa, whom they all, with very good reason, held to have been at the
bottom of the whole affair.

Salvator's enemies (of whom there were a goodly band) were not slow to
stir up the fire to the best of their ability. "See!" they said; "this
is Masaniello's worthy comrade, always ready to lay his hand to any
evil trick, any robberish undertaking; if his dangerous stay in Rome is
prolonged, we shall soon feel the effects of it heavily."

And, in fact, the ignoble herd of those who conspired against Salvator
succeeded in stemming the bold flight which his fame would otherwise
have taken. One picture after another came from his hand, bold of
conception, magnificent of execution, but the so-called "connoisseurs"
always shrugged the shoulder; said, now that the mountains were too
blue; now, that the trees were too green, the figures too tall, or
too stumpy; found fault with everything where there was no fault
to be found, and made it their business to detract from Salvator's
well-merited renown in every possible way. His chief persecutors were
the members of the Academia di San Luca, who could never get over the
affair of the surgeon, and went out of their own province to depreciate
the pretty verses which Salvator wrote about that time, even trying to
make out that he did not live upon the fruit of his own land, but
pilfered the property of other people. And this, too, led to Salvator's
being by no means in a position to surround himself with the splendour
and luxury which he had formerly displayed in Rome. Instead of the
grand, spacious studio, where all the celebrities of Rome used to visit
him,