Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/70

Rh of his pictures so striking, that his portraits impress you as delineations of familiar faces; and there are the pictures of Wolsey, of Sir Thomas More, of Harry the Eighth at different epochs of his life, and of Francis the First. Think of seeing contemporaneous pictures of these men by an exact hand! "Oh, ye gentlemen who live at home at ease," ye may sometimes envy us; and this I say while every bone is aching with the fatigue of this sight-seeing day.

We wound up with the gallery of Raphael's cartoons, so named, as perhaps you do not know, from their being done on a thin pasteboard, called in Italian cartone. They were done by the order of Leo the Tenth, to serve as models for the tapestry of one of the halls of the Vatican, and sent to Brussels, where the tapestry was to be woven. After vicissitudes whose history would make a volume, William the Third had this gallery constructed for them, and they were taken from the boxes, in which they were found carelessly packed, and in slips, and put together, and placed in plain frames. These cartoons are the delight of the artistic world. Perhaps the sketches and unfinished paintings of great artists give the best indications of those revelations of beauty that are made to their minds, and to which they can never give material expression. Can ideal perfection be manifested by form and colour? My admiration of the cartoons was very earnest, albeit unlearned. Paul preaching at Athens struck me as the grandest among them.