Most Wonderful Was And Will Always Be The "Boy In White," The Little Serene Princeling, Whoever He Was, In Whom_ The Painter Has Fixed Forever A Bewitching Mood And Moment Of Childhood.

"The Mother with two Children" is very well and self-evidently true to personality and period and position; but, after all, she is nothing beside that "Boy in White," though she and her children are otherwise so wonderful.

Now that I speak of her, however, she rather grows upon my recollection as a woman greater than her great world and proudly weary of it.

She was a lady of that very patrician house whose palace, in its cold grandeur and splendor, renews at once all one's faded or fading sense of the commercial past of Italy, when her greatest merchants were her greatest nobles and dwelt in magnificence unparalleled yet since Rome began to be old. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, what state their business men housed themselves in and environed themselves with! Their palaces by the hundreds were such as only the public edifices of our less simple State capitols could equal in size and not surpass in cost. Their _folie des grandeurs_ realized illusions in architecture, in sculpture, and in painting which the assembled and concentrated feats of those arts all the way up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the millionaire blocks eastward could not produce the likeness of. We have the same madness in our brains; we have even a Roman megalomania, but the effect of it in Chicago or Pittsburg or Philadelphia or New York has not yet got beyond a ducal or a princely son-in-law. The splendors of such alliances have still to take substantial form in a single instance worthy to compare with a thousand instances in the commercial republics of Italy. This does not mean that our rich people have not so much money as the Italians of the Renaissance, but that perhaps in their _folie des grandeurs_ they are a different kind of madmen; it means also that land and labor are dearer positively and comparatively with us, and that our pork-packing or stock-broking princes prefer to spend on comfort rather than size in their houses, and do not like the cold feet which the merchant princes of Italy must have had from generation to generation. I shall always be sorry I did not wear arctics when I went to the Pallavicini-Durazzo palace, and I strongly tirge the reader to do so when he goes.

He will not so much need them out-of-doors in a Genoese January, unless a _tramontana_ is blowing, and there was none on our half-day. But in any case we did not walk. We selected the best-looking cab-horse we could find, and he turned out better than his driver, who asked a fabulous price by the hour. We obliged him to show his tariff, when his wickedness was apparent from the printed rates. He explained that the part we were looking at was obsolete, and he showed us another part, which was really for drives outside the city; but we agreed to pay it, and set out hoping for good behavior from him that would make up the difference.

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