The play-guard of volunteer soldiers, who escort the
President of the United States in his Northern progresses, keep back
their fellow-citizens much more sternly and immitigably than the
Florentine guard kept back the populace from its despotic sovereign.
This morning J----- and I have been to the Uffizi gallery. It was his
first visit there, and he passed a sweeping condemnation upon everything
he saw, except a fly, a snail-shell, a caterpillar, a lemon, a piece of
bread, and a wineglass, in some of the Dutch pictures. The Venus de'
Medici met with no sort of favor. His feeling of utter distaste reacted
upon me, and I was sensible of the same weary lack of appreciation that
used to chill me through, in my earlier visits to picture-galleries; the
same doubt, moreover, whether we do not bamboozle ourselves in the
greater part of the admiration which we learn to bestow. I looked with
some pleasure at one of Correggio's Madonnas in the Tribune,--no divine
and deep-thoughted mother of the Saviour, but a young woman playing with
her first child, as gay and thoughtless as itself.
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