AT GENOA 55 



beloved task-mistress. He worked hard and well 

 in the art school, where he obtained a silver medal 

 * for a couple of legs the size of life drawn from one 

 of Raphael's cartoons.' His holidays were spent 

 in sketching; his evenings, when they were free, 

 at the theatre. Here at the opera he discovered 

 besides a taste for a new art, the art of music ; 

 and it was, he wrote, ' as if he had found out a 

 heaven on earth.' ' I am so anxious that whatever 

 he professes to know, he should really perfectly 

 possess,' his mother wrote, ' that I spare no pains ' ; 

 neither to him nor to myself, she might have added. 

 And so when he begged to be allowed to learn the 

 piano, she started him with characteristic barbarity 

 on the scales ; and heard in consequence ' heart- 

 rending groans ' and saw ' anguished claspings 

 of hands ' as he lost his way among their arid 

 intricacies. 



In this picture of the lad at the piano, there is The lad 

 something, for the period, girlish. He was indeed mother. 

 his mother's boy ; and it was fortunate his mother 

 was not altogether feminine. She gave her son 

 a womanly delicacy in morals, to a man's taste — 

 to his own taste in later life — too finely spun, and 

 perhaps more elegant than healthful. She encour- 

 aged him besides in drawing-room interests. But 

 in other points her influence was manlike. Filled 

 with the spirit of thoroughness, she taught him 

 to make of the least of these accomplishments a 



