The son of one of these pioneers, more rich than cultivated, noticed the other day, while visiting a friend of mine, an exquisite eighteenth-century bust of Madame de Pompadour, the pride of his hostess's drawing-room."Ah!" said Midas, "are busts the fashion again? I have one of my father, done in Rome in 1850.Iwill bring it down and put it in my parlor."The travellers consulted the residents in their purchases of copies of the old masters, for there were fashions in these luxuries as in everything else.There was a run at that time on the "Madonna in the Chair;" and "Beatrice Cenci" was long prime favorite.
Thousands of the latter leering and winking over her everlasting shoulder, were solemnly sent home each year.No one ever dreamed of buying an original painting! The tourists also developed a taste for large marble statues, "Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii"(people read Bulwer, Byron and the Bible then) being in such demand that I knew one block in lower Fifth Avenue that possessed seven blind Nydias, all life-size, in white marble, - a form of decoration about as well adapted to those scanty front parlors as a steam engine or a carriage and pair would have been.I fear Bulwer's heroine is at a discount now, and often wonder as I see those old residences turning into shops, what has become of the seven white elephants and all their brothers and sisters that our innocent parents brought so proudly back from Italy! I have succeeded in locating two statues evidently imported at that time.