t preservation, Penelope's web and the original designs for the
Tower of Babel, the draft made by Mr. Asquith for a reformed House of
Lords and the notes jotted down by the sometime German Emperor for a
proclamation from Versailles to the citizens of Paris. There too shall
be the MS. of that fragmentary 'Iphige'nie' which Racine laid aside so
meekly at the behest of Mlle. de Treves--'quoque cela fut de mon
mieux'; and there an early score of that one unfinished Symphony of
Beethoven's--I forget the number of it, but anyhow it is my favourite.
Among the pictures, Rossetti's oil-painting of 'Found' must be ruled
out, because we know by more than one drawing just what it would have
been, and how much less good than those drawings. But Leonardo's St.
Sebastian (even if it isn't Leonardo's) shall be there, and Whistler's
Miss Connie Gilchrist, and numerous other pictures that I would mention
if my mind were not so full of one picture to which, if I can find it
and acquire it, a special place of honour shall be given: a certain huge
picture in which a life-sized gentleman, draped in a white mantle,
sits on a fallen obelisk and surveys the ruined temples of the Campagna
Romana.

The reader knits his brow? Evidently he has not just been reading
Goethe's 'Travels in Italy.' I have. Or rather, I have just been reading
a translation of it, published in 1885 by George Bell & Sons. I daresay
it isn't a very good translation (for one has always understood that
Goethe, despite a resistant medium, wrote well--an accomplishment which
this translator hardly wins one to suspect). And I daresay the painting
I so want to see and have isn't a very good painting. Wilhelm Tischbein
is hardly a name to conjure with, though in his day, as a practitioner
in the 'historical' style, and as a rapturous resident in Rome,
Tischbein did great things; big things, at any rate. He did crowds of
heroes in helmets looked down at by gods on clouds; he did centaurs
leaping ravines; Sabine women; sieges of Troy. And he did this portrait
of Goethe. At least he began it. Why didn't he finish it? That is a
problem as to which one can but hazard guesses, reading between
the lines of Goethe's letters. The great point is that it never was
finished. By that point, as you read between those lines, you will be
amused if you are unkind, and worried if you are humane.

Worried, yet also pleased. Goethe has more than once been described as
'the perfect man.' He was assur