spread all over the civilized world, who was then at the head of his profession, the first of living sculptors, received all his company in a ragged old dressing-gown, put on over his drawers, and held round him to hide the absence of pantaloons. He was working on a small bas relief while talking to us.

In his little narrow bedroom were many precious relics. At the head of his bed was a portrait of Raphael, copied from that done by Pietro Perugino, in the Vatican; it represents him as a soldier asleep. Civic wreaths, long since faded and dried, were lying about. A bust of Napoleon I. showed that his once powerful patron was not forgotten. Very few of his own works were in his house; but in his numerous studios and workshops we saw a very large number. He had one married daughter, to whom he gave a handsome marriage portion, telling her that was all she would ever have from him, as the rest of his fortune would be left for the benefit of poor artists. We saw him once at a ball, given by the Duchess Torlonia, in full dress, which improved his appearance and made him look very handsome. He was of medium height, of rather square build, with a fair complexion, blue eyes, and flowing white locks. I stood near him when he was playing the original game of cards that was invented for the amusement of the crazy French

King. The cards were very large, and there were five suits of them, and each suit had five court cards, a knight being added to the number. What are spades with us were swords with them,

spada being the Italian for sword, it was corrupted into spades. Their clubs were representations of Hercules's club, and ten of them required a very large card. Tricks were taken as in whist, but it appeared to me a much more complicated game.

I

CHAPTER XXXIII.

WEARINESS OF ETIQUETTE.

the

BELIEVE there are many minds among votaries of fashion which are chafed and irritated by the restraints imposed upon them by the conventional society in which they are born, and such minds would often emancipate themselves, were it not that any attempt to do so is frowned down as ill breeding, or laughed at as eccentricity.

I know the daughter of an English earl who was so wearied by her training for high life that she eloped with her father's gardener, conformed entirely to her new position, and was very happy in it. She was never noticed by her family. They seemed to ignore her existence. Her husband was intelligent and industrious; he became the owner of a valuable nursery-garden near London, exhibited his plants at the horticultural shows, and attended the dinners given on such occasions. The last I heard of him was at one of these dinners, when he was challenged to drink wine by his noble father-in-law, and did

it as simply as if it had been with a fellow-gardener.

In visiting the retreat of the celebrated* ladies of Llangollen, I learned enough about them to convince me that it was a weariness of the ceremonies and restraints of high life, with a painful sense of the hollowness of worldly professions, that drove them to cut their connection with the society in which they were born, and lead a rural life among the Welsh mountains. Their disappearance from the fashionable world made a great sensation at the time, and it was generally supposed that some love affair was at the bottom of it. It was difficult to make the public renounce that idea, and the newspapers were for years inventing fictions to favor it. There was nothing remarkable in the lives they led except the privilege of doing as they pleased. There was no great scope for benevolence, but they were kind to their poor neighbors. They abridged the trouble which attends a lady's dress by wearing all the time cloth riding-habits and beaver hats. When young they rode much on horseback, when old they indulged in a carriage, and occasionally dined with a friend, at a distance of twenty miles,

* These ladies were Lady Eleanor Butler and the Hon. Miss Ponsonby, who suddenly quitted the world of fashion in London, and retired into Wales, where they spent the rest of their lives.

but always returned home at night. They were never known to sleep out of their own house, and so it was supposed that they had made a vow to that effect.

The daughters of George III. were often weary of court etiquette, and used to get rid of it by spending their mornings at Frogmore, near Windsor, a small establishment, where they enjoyed rural pleasures and were never intruded on by company. There they had their dumb pets and fed their own chickens, ran out and in unattended, and were entirely free from the trammels of royalty. I have been there just after they had left the place, and found their work and their books lying about, and everything looking like the home of a private family.

The wife of an officer in the army, who had apartments in Windsor Castle, said that the princesses would escape into her room sometimes, and beg for a glass of beer to quench their thirst, alleging as a reason for their doing so, that if they asked for it in their own home, they must wait for a barrel to be tapped, and that would cause a new office to be created, for serving beer to them between meals, and that barrel would become the perquisite of some one of the household, and a fresh barrel would be tapped every time a glass of beer was called for. So great was the discomfort of a royal household in those