Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/292

 which summed up his case in a happy phrase, might have recalled Plunket, but in truth, like most original men, he resembled no one but himself."

It was a rare enjoyment to visit the monuments and historic sites of such a city with such a guide. If a holidaymaker has seen the birthplace or the grave of the local artist or preacher, poet or patriot, where chance conducts his steps, he counts his day well spent. But when the painter is Raphael or Claude, the poet Tasso, the patriot Rienzi, and the preacher Saul of Tarsus or St. Matthew the Evangelist, written words are but a pale shadow of the feelings they evoke. To visit for the first time the noble halls and galleries, cabinets and courts of the Vatican, which vie in beauty with the treasures they contain, and make all other museums mean and dingy, is an education in art; and what an historical study is the Collegio Romano, where one may see the identical rooms occupied by eminent missionaries and saints of the Society of Jesus two centuries ago, still containing the books and furniture they used when they were students or professors, and its noble library, where it was a pleasant surprise to find the works of Savonarola on its shelves, and the portrait of Galileo in its observatory? And