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Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864

"Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete"

Bracelets, with several
different, yet relative designs, are often very beautiful. We find, at
different shops, a great inequality of prices for mosaics that seemed to
be of much the same quality.
We went to the Uffizi gallery, and found it much thronged with the middle
and lower classes of Italians; and the English, too, seemed more numerous
than I have lately seen them. Perhaps the tourists have just arrived
here, starting at the close of the London season. We were amused with a
pair of Englishmen who went through the gallery; one of them criticising
the pictures and statues audibly, for the benefit of his companion. The
critic I should take to be a country squire, and wholly untravelled; a
tall, well-built, rather rough, but gentlemanly man enough; his friend, a
small personage, exquisitely neat in dress, and of artificial deportment,
every attitude and gesture appearing to have been practised before a
glass. Being but a small pattern of a man, physically and
intellectually, he had thought it worth while to finish himself off with
the elaborateness of a Florentine mosaic; and the result was something
like a dancing-master, though without the exuberant embroidery of such
persons.


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