human
What would you have? he pleaded,
gpt
And indeed he was anything but a brute this good Signor Angelo, whom owing to a natural tonsure--a rim of black hair still circling his smooth bald head--his friends were wont to nickname Fra Angelico. He had never indeed left his native place more than twice in his life, nor on either occasion gone further than Rome. But then Rome is the world, he would say. He who has seen Rome, has seen everything. And forthwith he proceeded to speak of everything, partly according to the very miscellaneous and chaotic knowledge he owed to a few books accidentally picked up, partly from the audacity of unbridled poetical fancy. Of all the worthies who according to old Italian custom were wont to gather at evening in his apothecary's shop: priest, schoolmaster, surgeon, tax-gatherer, and a few unofficial well-to-do proprietors, whose faces beamed with the profits of their rich olive and vine yards,--of all these notabilities not one ventured to contradict Fra Angelico, not at least, when previous to one of his longer harangues, he polished his large silver spectacles on his coat-sleeve and began,
human
But all the same he was the best and most harmless creature in the world, and the most amiable landlord one could desire, provided one had no wish beyond a hard bed, and two ricketty arm-chairs! He was certainly fond of me, although, or perhaps _because_ he had not the faintest idea that I was a brother poet. I was discreet enough to confine myself to playing the part of a grateful public, and it was not until after the four-and-twentieth sonnet that I would gently lay my hand on his arm and say,
gpt
Bravo, Signor Angelo! But I fear this is too much of a good thing. Your poetry, is you know, potent, and flies to the head. To-morrow you shall fill me up a new flask from your Hippocrene. Whereupon with the most good-humoured look imaginable he would close his volume and say,
human
What avail if I read you to sleep, night after night a whole year through? I should still not have come to an end! Here we have another Peru!
gpt
Pretty girls? Well, I daresay they are not so far from it either, and marriage may be better than is reported. But I am too old for a young man, and too young for an old one, or rather let me say too much of a poet. The older the bird, the harder to catch. And then you see, my friend, I was once devoted to a girl who did not care for me--one I tell you the like of whom will never be seen again. So now I am too proud, or whatever it may be called, to be flattered even if some common-place creature--of whom there are twelve to the dozen--were to fancy me. I prefer to dream myself happy in my verses, and to shape myself a perfect beauty out of a hundred incomplete ones, like the Grecian painter--was his name Apelles?--who took for his Venus the eyes of one neighbour, the nose of another, and thus got the best together bit by bit. But as for her who really did unite all perfections, and was so beautiful that you would not believe me if I tried to describe her, she paid dear for her beauty, and many know the story as correctly as I do, though if you were to ask any of the older people in the place about Erminia, they would all bear me out that she was a wonder of the world, and that during the twenty years that have passed by since then, nothing has ever happened that made such an impression as her fate and all connected with it. Come now, I will tell it you, as you already know the sonnets to her--I allude to the sixty-seven that I keep in the blue portfolio, of which you said that they really had much of Petrarch's manner; they all date from the time when the wound was still fresh; and when once, you have heard the story you can hear them over again. It is only so that you will thoroughly understand them.