"I don't want cherubs, when I can have these putti.

And those old prince-bishops didn't, either!" "I don't suppose they kept a New England conscience," he said, with a vague smile.

"It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo." They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of despair which any perfection inspires.

They said how feminine it was, how exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had purified and left eternally charming.

They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.