"I have never seen Captain Willard in my life," he replied, laying aside the drawing.
It would have been wrong to doubt his word, but if any one else had spoken in the same curious, halting way I should have hesitated to believe him. I was on the point of asking him the reason of his evident surprise, when my attention was caught by a series of remarkable drawings that my uncle had just taken out of the portfolio. There were completed sketches of gravestones and monumental pieces, which I supposed had been drawn by Vasari at the request of some cemetery mason in want of new designs, or else were the result of some competition at an art school. Whatever their origin, they had provided Vasari with an opportunity of displaying his inventiveness and taste, and the result was a collection of from twenty to thirty funeral monuments of various graceful shapes, decorated with broken columns, reversed torches, urns, crosses, wreaths, and other objects emblematic of death and immortality.
But what interested me most in this collection was a sort of grim humour, which had taken the shape of placing on these monuments the names of many distinguished men, and from my knowledge of the artist's character, I readily discerned that the persons thus selected were those from whose opinions he differed. I suppose his eccentricity found a kind of pleasure in thus consigning to the tomb men whom he disliked. Some of the epitaphs served only to display the morbid vanity of the man, as, for instance:—
"Sacred to the Memory of
Frederick, Lord Leighton,
p. r. a.,
Who was succeeded in the Presidential Chair
by the Equally Eminent if not
Superior Artist,
Angelo Vasari."
A future Walpole in search of "Anecdotes of Painting" must not overlook the following curious incident:—
"In Memoriam,
Alma Tadema,
The Star among Artists,
Who died with grief at the eclipse of his name
by the Rising Sun,
Angelo Vasari."
"Egad!" said the Baronet, who was looking on with the half-abstracted air that he had displayed since the discovery of George's likeness. "I don't wonder he shut the portfolio up when he came to this exhibition of his vanity. What a conceited fool the fellow is!"
Casually turning over the rest of these drawings, we came upon the following singular epitaph, inscribed on a monument crowned with a piece of sculpture representing the Crucifixion: