f variety in the old masters"--
"The brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases
of feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The
Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest
is silence.

We arrived in Rome on the 17th of January, 1858, at eleven o'clock at
night. After a day or two at Spillman's Hotel, we moved into lodgings in
the Via Porta Pinciana, the Palazzo Larazani. The street extended just
below the ridge of the Pincian Hill, and was not far from the broad
flight of steps mounting upward from the Piazza d' Espagna, on the left
as you go up. In spite of its resounding name, our new dwelling had
not a palatial aspect. It was of no commanding height or architectural
pretensions; a stuccoed edifice, attached on both sides to other
edifices. The street, like other Roman streets, was narrow; it was dirty
like them, and, like them, was paved with cobble-stones. The place
had been secured for us by (I think) our friends the Thompsons; Mr.
Thompson--the same man who had painted my father's portrait in 1853--had
a studio hard by. The Thompsons had been living in Rome for five years
or more, and knew the Roman ropes. They were very comfortable people
to know; indeed, Rome to me would have been a very different and less
delightful place without them, as will hereafter appear. The family
consisted of Cephas Giovanni Thompson, the father and artist; his wife
and his two sons and one daughter. "Cephas Giovanni," being
interpreted, means plain Peter John; and it was said (though, I believe,
unjustifiably) that Peter John had been the names originally given to
Thompson by his parents at the baptismal-font, but that his wife, who
was a notable little woman, a sister of Anna Cora Mowatt, the actress,
well known in America and England seventy years ago, had persuaded
him to translate them into Greek and Italian, as more suitable to the
romantic career of an artist of the beautiful. I fancy the story arose
from the fact that Mrs. Thompson was a woman who, it was felt, might
imaginably conceive so ambitious a project. She was small, active,
entertaining, clever, and "spunky," as the New-Englanders would have
said; indeed, she had a rousing temper, on occasion. Her husband, on
the other hand, had the mildest, wisely smiling, philosophic air, with a
low, slow voice, and a beard of patriarchal fashion and size, though as
yet it was a rich brown, with scarcely a thread of silver in it