the art. Immediately under the ceiling is a line of portraits of great men both ancient and modern; of the latter many are copied from originals. The walls are adorned with pictures, and lined with busts and statues all antique, some in marble and some in bronze. All the busts are of Roman Emperors, or of persons connected with imperial families. The statues generally represent gods or heroes; of these, few are perfect, most having been damaged, and repaired with more or less felicity by modern artists. Intermingled with the statues and busts are altars and sarcophagi, shields, and trophies. Above the statues the pictures are ranged in such a manner as to form the history of the art from the eleventh century down to the seventeenth. The mixture of objects, sacred and profane, historical and fictitious, produces an unpleasant sensation; but according to the principles of the arrangement, which is to shew the progress of the art, seems unavoidable. The number both of paintings and statues surprizes; the excellency of many astonishes; and the effect of the whole at first is rather confusion than satisfaction. The arrangement, it must be admitted, is simple and methodical, but the objects press too close upon each other, and leave no time for discrimination.

The gallery is bordered on one side by a suit of apartments or halls, spacious and well-proportioned, twenty, I think, in number, each of which is consecrated to some particular set of masterpieces in sculpture or in painting, or to some particular school or favourite collection.

One of these halls is devoted to Niobe and her children, a collection in itself, consisting of sixteen figures, all intended to

form, like the Laocoon, one group. Whether this celebrated group be the original itself, which Pliny the Elder ascribes to either Scopas or Praxiteles*, or only a copy, is a subject of debate among critics; its merits are acknowledged, though very differently appreciated, as Winckelman and the Italian artists in general represent the different figures, particularly that of Niobe itself, as models of the highest perfection, and in every excellence equal to the two supposed grand masterpieces of the art; while the French, though they admit the general beauty, find fault with the details, and place them on the whole much lower in the scale of excellency. We are naturally inclined to prefer the opinion of the former, whose authority in the arts a transalpine connoisseur cannot safely reject; especially as we are inclined to suspect that the real cause of the criticism of the latter is the pure and almost sublime simplicity of these figures, expressing the extreme of fear in the daughters, and of grief in the mother, without grimace, distortion, or agitation.

Orba resedit

Exanimos inter natos, natasque virumque
Diriguitque malis, nullos movet aura capillos,
In vultu color est sine sanguine, lumina mæstis
Stant immota genis-nihil est in imagine vivi.

Ovid. Met. vi. 301.

These figures have been damaged and repaired.

* XXXVI. cap. 5. Ausonius decides in favour of the latter, probably because his name is better adapted to versification. The same reason may have influenced a writer in the Anthelogia Aus. Epitaph.-Anth. lib. 4.

The most beautiful of these halls, which contained the Venus of Medicis, may be considered as a temple to that goddess, equal perhaps in interior beauty to that of Paphos or Cythera: at present this temple is abandoned by its celestial inhabitant, and nearly stript of all its furniture. It contained the masterpieces of ancient sculpture and modern painting; when they are to be replaced it is difficult to determine. This little temple, for so we may call it, is an octagon of about four-and-twenty feet in diameter, its dome is adorned with mother of pearl, and its pavement formed of the most beautiful marbles. Other apartments are consecrated to the great schools of painting, and could formerly boast of many of the masterpieces of each; now their vacant places only are conspicuous; "sed præfulgebant eo ipso quod non visebantur*;" their absence announced their value and their celebrity.

* Tacitus, Annal. 1. 111.

CHAP. VIII.

ENVIRONS OF FLORENCE-THE ARNO-THE VILLAS OF THE GRAND DUKE-FÆSULE-VALLOMBROSA.

FROM the city we will pass to the neighbouring country, which presents as great a portion of rural beauty, hill and dale, orchard and vineyard, cottage and villa, as the environs of any capital in Europe, Naples perhaps excepted. Its first feature is the Arno, a river like the Tiber, inferior to many streams in magnitude, but superior to most in renown. Unknown in the first age of Italian verse, its name rose to eminence in the second, became the theme of many a strain, and was celebrated in both the divine dialects of Italy. Even foreign bards caught inspiration on its banks, and the genius of Milton himself loved to sport under the poplars that shade its borders.

ego quantus eram, gelidi cum stratus ad Arni
Murmura, populeumque nemus, qua mollior herba,
Carpere nunc violas, nunc summas carpere myrtos.
Epit. Dan.

These banks furnish many a wildly devious walk to the solitary wanderer, and to the city itself one of the most beautiful and most frequented haunts of fashion. But the Arno with all its fame is liable to the disadvantages of many southern streams; in summer it loses most of its waters, and presents to the eye at that season, even in the immediate neighbourhood of Florence, little more than a few pools united by a narrow rillet. The traveller then courts in vain the breezes that blow freshness from its waves, and listens in vain to the murmurs that delighted the ear of the poet. All around is heat and silence. The sultriness of this summer* is indeed said to be unusual, and it is to be hoped that the Arno is not thus annually stript of its coolness and its charms.

The villas of the Grand Dukes, if we consider their size, their architecture, or their present decorations, inspire no great interest; even their gardens display little or no pleasing scenery, no masses of shade, no expansions of water, no groves or thickets, to delight the eye or amuse the fancy. All is art, stiff, minute, and insignificant; besides, they seem much neglected, and are in general out of repair. Yet it is impossible to visit some of them without emotion, such as Pratolino, Caiano, and Carreggi, the retreats of the Medici and once the haunts of the Italian muses. The last of these villas witnessed the closing stage of Lorenzo's career, and if the solemn scene that terminates the life of a benefactor of mankind can confer dignity or communicate interest, the chamber where Lorenzo died must excite both veneration and emotion.

* 1802.