a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because
the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a
very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to
make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was
crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather
have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary
capacity. I certainly meant to keep that promise, but I find I can not
do it. It is impossible to travel through Italy without speaking of
pictures, and can I see them through others' eyes?

If I did not so delight in the grand pictures that are spread before me
every day of my life by that monarch of all the old masters, Nature, I
should come to believe, sometimes, that I had in me no appreciation of
the beautiful, whatsoever.

It seems to me that whenever I glory to think that for once I have
discovered an ancient painting that is beautiful and worthy of all
praise, the pleasure it gives me is an infallible proof that it is not a
beautiful picture and not in any wise worthy of commendation. This very
thing has occurred more times than I can mention, in Venice. In every
single instance the guide has crushed out my swelling enthusiasm with the
remark:

"It is nothing--it is of the Renaissance."

I did not know what in the mischief the Renaissance was, and so always I
had to simply say,

"Ah! so it is--I had not observed it before."

I could not bear to be ignorant before a cultivated negro, the offspring
of a South Carolina slave. But it occurred too often for even my
self-complacency, did that exasperating "It is nothing--it is of the
Renaissance." I said at last:

"Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him
permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?"

We learned, then, that Renaissance was not a man; that renaissance was a
term used to signify what was at best but an imperfect rejuvenation of
art. The guide said that after Titian's time and the time of the other
great names we had grown so familiar with, high art declined; then it
partially rose again--an inferior sort of painters sprang up, and these
shabby pictures were the work of their hands. Then I said, in my heat,
that I "wished to goodness high art had declined five hundred years
sooner." The Renaissance pictures suit me very well, though sooth to say
its school were too much given to painting r