362 PRÆTERITA-II

might have happened, as so often aforesaid.¹ But we separated, to our sorrow then, and harm, afterwards. I went off into higher and vainer vaporization at Venice; he went back to Berne, and under the patronage of its aristocracy, made his black bread by dull portrait-painting to the end of a lost life. I saw the arid remnant of him in his Bernese painting, or daubing, room, many a year afterwards, and reproached the heartless Alps, for his sake.

129. Of other companionship in Florence, except Couttet’s, I had none. I had good letters to Mr. Millingen,² and of course a formal one to the British Embassy. I called on Mr. Millingen dutifully, but found he knew nothing after the fourth century B.C., and had as little taste for the Liber Studiorum as the Abbé Rosini.³ I waited on the Ambassador, and got him to use British influence enough to let me into the convent of the Magdalen, wherein I have always since greatly praised Perugino’s fresco,⁴ with a pleasant feeling that nobody else could see it. I never went near the Embassy afterwards, nor the Embassy near me, till I sent my P.P.C. card by George, when I was going away, before ten in the morning, which caused Lord--’s porter to swear fearfully at George and his master both. And it was the last time I ever had anything to do with Embassies, except through the mediation of pitying friends.

There was yet another young draughtsman in Florence, who lessoned me to purpose-a French youth;-his family name Dieudonné; I knew him by no other. He had trained himself to copy Angelico, in pencil tint, wrought with the point, as pure as the down on a butterfly’s wing, and with perfect expression: typical engraving in grey, of inconceivable delicacy. I have never seen anything the least

¹ [See, e.g., pp. 96, 120, 228, 304.]

² [James Millingen, archæologist, died at Florence in this year of Ruskin’s visit (1845), at the age of seventy-one. The British Ambassador to the Court of Tuscany was at this time Henry Edward Fox, fourth Lord Holland (1802-1859).]

³ [See above, p. 354.]

⁴ [The convent, not of the Magdalen, but of S. Maria Maddalena (1566-1607), now secularised. For Ruskin’s notice of Perugino’s fresco (of the Crucifixion), in the chapter-house, see Vol. IV. p. 322 n.]

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