At Dresden, Bayard visited the picture-gallery, for the purpose of seeing Raphael’s Madonna and Child, known as the Madonna di San Sisto. His description of that painting, so unfortunately abridged² in his book, was one of the finest examples of art criticism to be found in print. His appreciation³ of painting and sculpture was remarkable⁴, indeed, for one who never made them a professional study, and whose rude sketches⁵ in pencil in his note books, contained nearly all of his undertakings⁶ as an amateur. His soul seemed cast in the proper mould for that kind of work, but his hand was never trained to materialize the pictures that filled the galleries of his imagination. He had all those finer sensibilities and acute instincts which fitted him for art in poetry or stone, and he saw in paintings and statuary, beauties or defects which thousands of colder but more studious critics failed to notice.

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He spoke⁸ of that Madonna at Dresden, as a painting that moved his whole nature in admiration⁹. He enjoyed it. He feasted on it. He read it as one follows an exciting romance. He felt the power of the picture as Raphael felt it, and seemed to appreciate it even more keenly than the artist. How much satisfaction and delight he found in the enormous collections of art in the Old World, cannot be told or understood by any one whose natural genius leads them not in such a direction. His mental appetite for such things grew so keen, as he went on from city to city and gallery to gallery, that he much preferred to leave his meals untasted, than pass a great painting without study. Like the true artist, his mind took in the grand ideals, and his respect and admiration for the divine handiwork in producing man and beast, caused him often to

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