my face with the other. For my notion of heroic
women has always been, I am afraid, rather base--a sort of "They do not
mind death, but they can not bear pinching;" and though Euphrasia might,
could, would, and should stab the man who was about to murder her
father, I have no idea that she would like to look at the man she had
stabbed. "O Jupiter, no blood!" is apt to be the instinct, I suspect,
even in very villainous feminine natures, and those who are and those
who are not cowards alike shrink from sights of horror.

When I made Macdonald's acquaintance I was a girl of about seventeen,
and he at the very beginning of his artistic career; but he had an
expression of power and vivid intelligence which foretold his future
achievements in the exquisite art to which he devoted himself.

When next I met Macdonald it was after a long lapse of time, in 1846, in
Rome. Thither he had gone to study his divine art, and there he had
remained for a number of years in the exercise of it. He was now the
Signor Lorenzo of the Palazzo Barberini, the most successful and
celebrated maker of busts, probably, in Rome, having achieved fame,
fortune, the favor of the great, and the smiles of the fair, of the most
fastidious portion of the English society that makes its winter season
in Italy. He dined several times at our house (I was living with my
sister and her husband); under his guidance we went to see the statutes
of the Vatican by torchlight; and he came out once or twice in the
summer of that year to visit us at our villa at Frascati.

I returned to Rome in 1852, and saw Macdonald frequently, in his studio,
in our own house, and in general society; and shortly before leaving
Rome I met him at dinner at Mrs. Archer Clive's (the authoress of "Paul
Ferrol"). I had a nosegay of snowdrops in the bosom of my dress, and
Macdonald, who sat next me, observed that they reminded him of Scotland,
that he had never seen one in all the years he had passed in Italy, and
did not even know that they grew there.

The next day I went to the gardener of the Villa Medici, an old friend
of mine, and begged him to procure a pot of snowdrops for me, which I
carried to Macdonald's studio, thinking an occasional reminiscence of
his own northern land, which he had not visited for years, not a bad
element to infuse into his Roman life and surroundings. Macdonald's
portraits are generally good likenesses, sufficiently idealized to be
also good works of art.