the papers such phrases as,
"Our most respected Andrei Petrovitch; our worthy Andrei Petrovitch."
He began to receive offers of distinguished posts in the service,
invitations to examinations and committees. He began, as is usually
the case in maturer years, to advocate Raphael and the old masters, not
because he had become thoroughly convinced of their transcendent
merits, but in order to snub the younger artists. His life was already
approaching the period when everything which suggests impulse contracts
within a man; when a powerful chord appeals more feebly to the spirit;
when the touch of beauty no longer converts virgin strength into fire
and flame, but when all the burnt-out sentiments become more vulnerable
to the sound of gold, hearken more attentively to its seductive music,
and little by little permit themselves to be completely lulled to sleep
by it. Fame can give no pleasure to him who has stolen it, not won it;
so all his feelings and impulses turned towards wealth. Gold was his
passion, his ideal, his fear, his delight, his aim. The bundles of
bank-notes increased in his coffers; and, like all to whose lot falls
this fearful gift, he began to grow inaccessible to every sentiment
except the love of gold. But something occurred which gave him a
powerful shock, and disturbed the whole tenor of his life.

One day he found upon his table a note, in which the Academy of Painting
begged him, as a worthy member of its body, to come and give his opinion
upon a new work which had been sent from Italy by a Russian artist
who was perfecting himself there. The painter was one of his former
comrades, who had been possessed with a passion for art from his
earliest years, had given himself up to it with his whole soul,
estranged himself from his friends and relatives, and had hastened to
that wonderful Rome, at whose very name the artist's heart beats wildly
and hotly. There he buried himself in his work from which he permitted
nothing to entice him. He visited the galleries unweariedly, he stood
for hours at a time before the works of the great masters, seizing and
studying their marvellous methods. He never finished anything without
revising his impressions several times before these great teachers,
and reading in their works silent but eloquent counsels. He gave each
impartially his due, appropriating from all only that which was most
beautiful, and finally became the pupil of the divine Raphael alone, as
a great poe