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[76] that they call Nymphs and Venuses and Psyches, and a plenty of chubby boys that they would pass off for Genii; but all poetry is wanting. There is more depth of meaning in the group that Greenough made for Mr. Cabot than in all of them put together.1

Painting is still worse. Cammuccini here and Benvenuti in Florence reign supreme, but there is not a man in Europe who can paint a picture like Allston. . . . .


Journal

February 27.—In the evening there was a great oratorio at the Palazzo di Venezia, given by Count Lutzow, the Austrian Ambassador . . . . It was Haydn's Creation, performed by a chorus of ninety singers and a band of fifty instruments, with Camporesi for the prima donna.2 . . . . Mad. de Lutzow herself was in the chorus, and once sang in a trio with a good deal of sweetness; so much does a love and consideration for the arts prevail—at least in Italy and Germany-over the consideration of rank and place. The whole entertainment, indeed, was elegant, and was given in a magnificent room, said to be the finest in Rome, which is opened only at intervals of years. Some notion of its size may be had from the facts that there were eight hundred people in it, nearly all comfortably seated on cushioned chairs, and that, being finished in the style of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, it was necessary to make the pilasters taller, and the griffins of the frieze larger, than they are in that beautiful ruin in the Forum, because the proportions of the room required it.

March 1.—. . . . I went to Mr. Bunsen's lecture, which was still on the Forum. In the evening I dined with Mr. Hare,3 an English gentleman of fortune and high connections, who lives here for his health, and has his family with him. He is an accomplished, scholar-like person, and has been established here so long that he is to be accounted almost a Roman; but he is withal very agreeable and acute. Nobody was at table but the Prussian Minister, Colonel Mure, Monsignor


1 A group representing a child-angel ushering a newly arrived child-spirit into heaven. It is now owned by Mrs. T. B. Curtis, of Boston.

2 Who, as Catalani herself told Kestner, drove her off the stage, and reigned as the prima donna in London, till she had retrieved the broken fortunes of a foolish husband. For the six or eight years after she completed that object she had lived retired in Rome, and it was esteemed a privilege to hear her.

3 Francis, eldest brother of Augustus and Julius Hare, authors of ‘Guesses at Truth.’

Boston, J. R. Osgood and company, 1876.

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