nobility and the other for the merchants and burghers; the wives and
daughters of the members attend occasionally; and cards, music and dancing
are the amusements. Florence abounds in artists in alabaster whose
workmanship is beautiful. They make models in alabaster of the most
celebrated pieces of sculpture and architecture, on any scale you chuse:
they fabricate busts too and vases in alabaster. The vases made in
imitation of the ancient Greek vases are magnificent, and some of them are
of immense size. Foreigners generally chuse to have their busts taken; for
almost all foreigners who arrive here are or pretend to be smitten with an
ardent love for the fine arts, and every one wishes to take with him models
of the fine things he has seen in Italy, on his return to his native
country. Here are English travellers who at home would scarcely be able to
distinguish the finest piece of ancient sculpture--the Mercury, for
instance, in the Florentine Gallery, from a Mercury in a citizen's garden
at Highgate--who here affect to be in extacies at the sight of the Venus,
Apollino, &c., and they are fond of retailing on all occasions the terms of
art and connoisseurship they have learned by rote, in the use of which they
make sometimes ridiculous mistakes. For instance I heard an Englishman one
day holding forth on the merits of the Vierge _quisouse_, as he called it.
I could not for some time divine what he meant by the word _quisouse_, but
after some explanation I found that he meant the celebrated painting of the
_Vierge qui coud_, or _Vierge couseuse_, as it is sometimes called, which
latter word he had transformed into _quisouse_. This affectation, however,
of passion for the _belle arti_, tho' sometimes open to ridicule, is very
useful. It generates taste, encourages artists, and is surely a more
innocent as well as more rational mode of spending money and passing time
than in encouraging pugilism or in racing, coach driving and cock fighting.


[83] Pope, _Essay on Man_, ep. III, 303-4.--ED.