II. ROME 267

nor forded, but was clumsily ferried, and at one place my mother had no choice really but between wading or being carried. She suffered the indignity, I think with some feeling of its being a consequence of the French Revolution, and remained cross all the way to Carrara.

We were going on to Massa to sleep, but had time to stop and walk up the dazzling white road to the lower quarry, and even to look into one or two “studios,”- beginnings of my fixed contempt for rooms so called, ever since. Nevertheless, partly in my father’s sense of what was kind and proper to be done,-partly by way of buying “a trifle from Matlock,”-and partly because he and I both liked the fancy of the group, we bought a two-feet high “Bacchus and Ariadne,” copied from I know not what (we supposed classic) original, and with as much art in it as usually goes to a French timepiece. It remained long on a pedestal in the library at Denmark Hill, till it got smoked, and was put out of the way.

With the passage of the Magra, and the purchase of the “Bacchus and Ariadne,” to remain for a sort of monument of the two-feet high knowledge of classic art then possessed by me, ended the state of mind in which my notions of sculpture lay between Chantrey and Roubilliac. Across Magra I felt that I was in Italy proper; the next day we drove over the bridge of Serchio into Lucca.

27. I am wrong in saying I “felt,” then, I was in Italy proper. It is only in looking back that I can mark the exact point where the tide began to turn for me; and total ignorance of what early Christian art meant, and of what living sculpture meant, were first pierced by vague wonder and embarrassed awe, at the new mystery round me. The effect of Lucca on me at this time is now quite confused with the far greater one in 1845.¹ Not so that of the first sight of Pisa, where the solemnity and purity of its architecture impressed me deeply;-yet chiefly in connection with Byron and Shelley. A masked brother of the

¹ [For which, see below, p. 346.]

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