al reasons for the process. He turns to a
group of RAPHAEL'S (I beg pardon, RAFAELLE'S), and would not for the
world spoil the pleasure they give him by speculating on the Roman
School and the artist's three manners, and the influence of PIETRO
PERUGINO or MICHAEL ANGELO on his style, and so forth. These fine art
critics are a cold-blooded set of fellows, and look at a picture as an
attorney does at a lease, to see if they cannot pick a hole in it.

All this time the eyes of the enthusiast have been wandering to a corner
of the chamber where an artist is copying a small _Rembrandt_. It is not
the _Rembrandt_ he is regarding, but the artist. How excessively nice!
The most charming young lady perched on a pair of steps, like a dear
little bird in a tree. She bends over her work and draws her head back,
and scans the effect on one side and the other with, really, the most
irritating picturesqueness. She wears a blue robe just the colour of her
eyes, with a little ermine tippet, and when an ancient dragon, who is
reading a novel at the foot of the steps, in a cloak and ugly bonnet,
speaks to her, she laughs and shakes her blond _chevelure_, and is so
delightful altogether, that it is quite impossible to attend to the
pictures. Let us go into the long gallery where the students are not so
fascinating. Dirty, long-haired, and bearded men in blouses, and females
in seedy crumpled black, look up as we pass by from their easels.

An English family runs past with the blue catalogues in their hands. A
precious bore the whole affair is to them. They must be quick, there is
no time to lose. "What a lot of pictures! Isn't that a funny man with a
beard? How slippery the floor is! RUBENS, ah, really. Come, girls, we
must get back to MEWREISE'S to lunch. There's the Bose Arts, and the
Museum of Artillery, and the Bois de Bullown"--"You should say Bulloyne,
Pa"--"to be done before dinner."

A long vista of pictures ordered, as all galleries should be,
chronologically. As you enter, mystical compositions, or rather
apparitions of draped angels and saints gaze at you with sleepy eyes
from firmaments of gold. Their limbs are long and gaunt; their looks
grimly devout, and their heads are set awry on their shoulders. Is it
credible that there should be educated men in the present day who yearn
after these barbarisms, and have no sympathy with the struggles made by
subsequent artists to get free from their influence? And that clergymen
shoul