he lines. In the first week of June he was once more
in Rome. I can imagine with what high courtesy, as though there were
nothing to rebuke, he treated Tischbein. But it is possible that
his manner would have been less perfect had the portrait not been
unfinished.

His sittings were resumed. It seems that Signora Zucchi, better known to
the world as Angelica Kauffmann, had also begun to paint him. But, great
as was Goethe's esteem for the mind of that nice woman, he set no store
on this fluttering attempt of hers: 'her picture is a pretty fellow, to
be sure, but not a trace of me.' It was by the large and firm 'historic'
mode of Tischbein that he, not exactly in his habit as he lived, but in
the white mantle that so well became him, and on the worthy throne of
that fallen obelisk, was to be handed down to the gaze of future ages.
Was to be, yes. On June 27th he reports that Tischbein's work 'is
succeeding happily; the likeness is striking, and the conception pleases
everybody.' Three days later: 'Tischbein goes to Naples.'

Incredible! We stare aghast, as in the presence of some great dignitary
from behind whom, by a ribald hand, a chair is withdrawn when he is
in the act of sitting down. Tischbein had, as it were, withdrawn the
obelisk. What was Goethe to do? What can a dignitary, in such case, do?
He cannot turn and recriminate. That would but lower him the more. Can
he behave as though nothing has happened? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
tried to do so. And it must have been in support of this attempt that he
consented to leave his own quarters and reside awhile in the studio of
the outgoing Tischbein. That slippery man does, it is true, seem to have
given out that he would not be away very long; and the prospect of his
return may well have been reckoned in mitigation of his going. Goethe
had leave from the Duke of Weimar to prolong his Italian holiday till
the spring of next year. It is possible that Tischbein really did mean
to come back and finish the picture. Goethe had, at any rate, no reason
for not hoping.

'When you think of me, think of me as happy,' he directs. And had he
not indeed reasons for happiness? He had the most perfect health, he was
writing masterpieces, he was in Rome--Rome which no pilgrim had loved
with a rapture deeper than his; the wonderful old Rome that lingered
on almost to our own day, under the conserving shadow of the Temporal
Power; a Rome in which the Emperors kept unquestionably their