deeper into difficulties, commenting in his Sicilian jargon in order to prove that what he said was not foolish, but, on the contrary, the most refined flattery. I do not think that the beautiful lady paid much attention to Bellini's phrases. She had taken his little cane, wherewith he often helped himself out of weak places in rhetoric, and calmly used it to disarrange the elaborate arrangement of the hair on both temples of the young maestro. This caprice well became the smile which gave her features an expression such as I have never seen on a living human face. It was one of those which belong far more to the dream-realm of poetry than to the rough reality of life—contours recalling Da Vinci, that noble soul!—with the naive dimples in the chin, and the sentimental pointed-out bending chin of the Lombard school. The colour was rather of a Roman softness, a mother-of-pearl gleam, aristocratic paleness—morbidezza. In short, it was such a face as can only be found in old Italian portraits, in which the masters of the sixteenth century depicted as a master-work the portraits of great ladies whom they loved—such as poets sang when they sang for immortality, and such as German and French heroes yearned for when they girded on their swords, and seeking great deeds rushed over the Alps. Yes, yes, it was such a face, in which there
