h of any feeling
for the works around me. I do not mean to apply this to a _tete-a-tete_
scrutiny with Rogers, who has an excellent taste, and deep feeling for
the arts, (indeed much more of both than I can possess, for of the
FORMER I have not much,) but to the crowd of jostling starers and
travelling talkers around me.

"I heard one bold Briton declare to the woman on his arm, looking at the
Venus of Titian, 'Well, now, this is really very fine indeed,'--an
observation which, like that of the landlord in Joseph Andrews on 'the
certainty of death,' was (as the landlord's wife observed) 'extremely
true.'

"In the Pitti Palace, I did not omit Goldsmith's prescription for a
connoisseur, viz. 'that the pictures would have been better if the
painter had taken more pains, and to praise the works of Pietro
Perugino.'"

* * * * *

LETTER 466. TO MR. MURRAY.

"Pisa, November 3. 1821.

"The two passages cannot be altered without making Lucifer talk
like the Bishop of Lincoln, which would not be in the character of
the former. The notion is from Cuvier (that of the _old worlds_),
as I have explained in an additional note to the preface. The other
passage is also in character: if _nonsense_, so much the better,
because then it can do no harm, and the sillier Satan is made, the
safer for every body. As to 'alarms,' &c. do you really think such
things ever led any body astray? Are these people more impious than
Milton's Satan? or the Prometheus of AEschylus? or even than the
Sadducees of * *, the 'Fall of Jerusalem' * *? Are not Adam, Eve,
Adah, and Abel, as pious as the catechism?

"Gifford is too wise a man to think that such things can have any
_serious_ effect: _who_ was ever altered by a poem? I beg leave to
observe, that there is no creed nor personal hypothesis of mine in
all this; but I was obliged to make Cain and Lucifer talk
consistently, and surely this has always been permitted to poesy.
Cain is a proud man: if Lucifer promised him kingdom, &c. it would
_elate_ him: the object of the Demon is to _depress_ him still
further in his own estimation than he was before, by showing him
infinite things and his own abasement, till he falls into the frame
of mind that leads to the catastrophe, from mere _internal_
irritation, _not_ premeditation, or envy of _Abel_ (which would