At Any
Rate, She Would Not Be Satisfied Till She Had Returned A Roland For That
Easy Oliver.
Her chance came in showing a Rubens in one of the rooms,
with the master's usual assortment of billowy
Beauties, when she could
say - and she ought to have known - that they had eaten too much macaroni.
It was not much of a joke; but one hears so few jokes in Rome.
Do I linger in this study of simple character because I feel myself
unequal to the ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in
that pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but I
do not pride myself on my inability. It seemed to me that the coloring
of the frescos had lost whatever tenderness it once had; and that what
was never meant to be matter of conscious perception, but only of the
vague sense which it is the office of decoration to impart, had grown
less pleasing with the passage of time. There in the first hall was the
story of Cupid and Psyche in the literal illustration of Apuleius, and
there in another hall was Galatea on her shell with her Nymphs and
Tritons and Amorini; and there were Perseus and Medusa and Icarus and
Phaeton and the rest of them. But, if I gave way to all the frankness of
my nature, I should own the subjects fallen sillv through the old age of
an outworn life and redeemed only by the wonderful skill with which they
are rendered.
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