Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/82

Rh where our Franklin lived, and other classic localities. Ah! this goes to swell my pathetic reiteration of the general lament, "I have had my losses!"

His manners are those of a man of the world (in its best sense), simple and natural, without any apparent consciousness of name or fame to support. His house, as all the civilized world knows, is a cabinet of art, selected and arranged with consummate taste. The house itself is small; not, I could think, more than twenty-live feet front, and perhaps forty deep, in a most fortunate location, overlooking the Green Park. The first sight of it from the windows produces a sort of coup-de-théâtre, for you approach the house and enter it by a narrow street. Every inch of it is appropriated to some rare treasure or choice production of art. Besides the pictures (and "What," you might be tempted to ask, "can a man want besies such pictures?) are Etruscan vases (antiques), Egyptian antiquities, casts of the Elgin marbles decorating the staircase wall, and endless adornments of this nature. There are curiosities of another species, rare books, such as a most beautifully -illuminated missal, exquisitely- delicate paintings, designed for marginal decorations, executed three hundred years ago, and taken from the Vatican by the French—glorious robbers! In a catalogue of his books, in the poet's own beautiful autograph, there were inserted some whimsical titles of books, such as "Nebuchadnezzar on Grasses."

But the most interesting thing in all the collection was the original document, with Milton's