VII. MACUGNAGA 363

approaching it since, but did not then enough know its value. Dieudonné’s prices were necessarily beyond those of the water-colour copyists, and he would not always work, even when the price was ready for him. He went back to France, and was effaced in the politeness of Paris, as Rudolph in the rudeness of Berne. Hard homes alike, their native cities, to them both.

130. My own work in Florence, this time, was chiefly thinking and writing-progressive, but much puzzled, and its Epicurean pieties a little too dependent on enamel and gilding. A study in the rose-garden of San Miniato, and in the cypress avenue of the Porta Romana, remain to me, for memorials of perhaps the best days of early life.¹

Couttet, however, was ill at ease and out of temper in Florence, little tolerant of Italian manners and customs; and not satisfied that my studies in sacristies and cloisters were wise, or vials of myrrh and myrtle essence as good for me as the breeze over Alpine rose. He solaced himself by making a careful collection of all the Florentine wildflowers for me, exquisitely pressed and dried,-now, to my sorrow, lost or burned with all other herbaria; they fretted me by bulging always in the middle, and crumbling, like parcels of tea, over my sketches.

At last the Arno dried up; or, at least, was reduced to the size of the Effra at Dulwich, with muddy shingle to the shore; and the grey “pietra serena”² of Fésole was like hot iron in the sun, sprinkled with sand. Also, I had pretty well tired myself out, and, for the present, spent all my pictorial language;-so that we all of us were pleased to trot over the Apennines, and see the gleam of Monte Rosa again from Piacenza and Pavia. Once it was in sight, I went straight for it, and remember nothing more till we were well afoot in the Val Anzasca.

131. The afternoon rambles to Fésole and Bellosguardo,

¹ [The “rose-garden” may be the drawing here reproduced (Plate XXIV.); the “cypress avenue” is unknown to the editors.]

² [A technical term applied to a stone found at Fésole and in various parts of the Apeunines: see Tommaseo’s Italian Dictionary, 1869, vol. iii. p. 1023.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]