A charming old Italian writer has laid down the canons of perfect feminine beauty with much nicety in a delicious discourse, which, as he delivered it in a sixteenth- century
Florentine garden to an audience of beautiful and noble ladies, an audience not too large to be intimate and not too small to be embarrassing, it was his delightful good fortune and privilege to illustrate by pretty and sly references to the characteristic beauties of the several ladies seated like a ring of roses around him.
We tried indolently to recollect something about the Guelphs and Ghibelines and the other historical cut-throats whose quarrels and assassinations make up so large a share of Florentine history, but the subject was not attractive.
Florentine mosaics are the choicest in all the world.
They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines. They even help out the delusion by building bridges over it.
Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed the book on the little
Florentine table that always stood at his bedside and began to dress for dinner.
In the poem a Florentine lady of old time, wedded to a cold and cruel husband, had died, or was supposed to have died, and had been carried to "the rich, the beautiful, the dreadful tomb" of her proud family.
She was, in very truth, the Florentine judge, stern, stately, impassive.
We were of the old
Florentine nobility"-- Rowena's heart gave a great bound, her nostrils expanded, and a fine light played in her eyes--"and when the war broke out, my father was on the losing side and had to fly for his life.
"Yes, a chef d'oeuvre of the great
Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini," replied Athos.
How could a
Florentine cab-driver ever get hold of Cecil?"
I affirm that he shared the general beatitude, and that, quite the reverse of La Fontaine, who, at the presentation of his comedy of the "
Florentine," asked, "Who is the ill-bred lout who made that rhapsody?" Gringoire would gladly have inquired of his neighbor, "Whose masterpiece is this?"
The king, however, having acquired Lombardy, regained at once the authority which Charles had lost: Genoa yielded; the
Florentines became his friends; the Marquess of Mantua, the Duke of Ferrara, the Bentivogli, my lady of Forli, the Lords of Faenza, of Pesaro, of Rimini, of Camerino, of Piombino, the Lucchese, the Pisans, the Sienese--everybody made advances to him to become his friend.