He gladly abandoned his business to the care of
his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with
strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal to
do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they
dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his
prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble
floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole
place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who
seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch
or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature
of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments
of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,
how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.
It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they
were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on
them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their
ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared
themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt
falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to
art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's maker
and one's neighbor.
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