r splendid
chef d'ecole, a Rubens or a Horace Vernet, may sit with a secretary
reading to him; a troop of admiring scholars watching the master's hand;
or a company of court ladies and gentlemen (to whom he addresses a few
kind words now and again) looking on admiringly; whilst the humblest
painter, be he ever so poor, may have a friend watching at his easel, or
a gentle wife sitting by with her work in her lap, and with fond smiles
or talk or silence cheering his labour.

Amongst all ranks and degrees of painters assembled at Rome, Mr. Clive
found companions and friends. The cleverest man was not the best
artist very often: the ablest artist not the best critic nor the best
companion. Many a man could give no account of the faculty within him,
but achieved success because he could not help it; and did, in an hour
and without effort, that which another could not effect with half a
life's labour. There were young sculptors who had never read a line of
Homer, who took on themselves nevertheless to interpret and continue the
heroic Greek art. There were young painters with the strongest natural
taste for low humour, comic singing, and Cyder-Cellar jollifications,
who would imitate nothing under Michael Angelo, and whose canvases
teemed with tremendous allegories of fates, furies, genii of death and
battle. There were long-haired lads who fancied the sublime lay in
the Peruginesque manner, and depicted saintly personages with crisp
draperies, crude colours, and haloes of gold-leaf. Our friend marked all
these practitioners of Art with their various oddities and tastes, and
was welcomed in the ateliers of all of them, from the grave dons and
seniors, the senators of the French and English Academy, down to the
jovial students who railed at the elders over their cheap cups at the
Lepre. What a gallant, starving, generous, kindly life, many of them
led! What fun in their grotesque airs, what friendship and gentleness
in their poverty! How splendidly Carlo talked of the marquis his cousin,
and the duke his intimate friend! How great Federigo was on the subject
of his wrongs, from the Academy at home, a pack of tradesmen who could
not understand high art, and who had never seen a good picture! With
what haughtiness Augusto swaggered about at Sir John's soirees, though
he was known to have borrowed Fernando's coat, and Luigi's dress-boots!
If one or the other was ill, how nobly and generously his companions
flocked to comfort him,