Capital punishment
there is none in Italy. Why waste a citizen and a tax-payer? Especially
when one has already been destroyed! No, he will be sentenced to a term
of imprisonment. But he will not serve it. He will escape, or it will be
commuted. And while he is in gaol he will have a good time. He will smoke
and play cards, or, leaning out of his dungeon casement, hold a levee of
his friends. Recently the soldiers at Bergamo mutinied because they were
supplied with worse bread than the denizens of the gaol. I trust the
ringleaders were sent to prison so as to remedy this dietary injustice.
Please do _me_ the justice to remark that I have been in Italy for
several paragraphs without once referring to the Old Masters. But the
fact is that I have not been much at the Masked Balls. Does this saying
seem cryptic? All it means is that the confusion into which our
scientific century has thrown us is worse confounded than usual in the
universe of pictures; that the Galleries appear to be made up of pictures
masquerading under wrong names. Time was when one might go about
comfortably with a Baedeker and a stock of admiration and distribute it
as per instructions. But these good old times are over. The Old Masters
of yesterday are the young apprentices of to-day.
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