and Holofernes of Donatello. In the third, Giovanni di Bologna has represented, with equal spirit, the Rape of a Sabine Virgin by a Roman Warrior.

A Moralist cannot but regret that the finest talents should be thus employed in perpetuating acts of violence and cruelty: but such is the fatality of statuary that it is difficult to invent a harmless circumstance that can be accompanied with the degree of action that seems necessary to animate a Groupe-Alike unhappily in Painting, the graces of Nature can hardly be displayed to advantage, without offending, more or less, against the rules of decency and continence.

On

On one side of the Square is an Equestrian Statue of Cosmo the First, by Giovanni di Bologna.

Double Corridors form a street to the left of the Palace, opening upon the river by Arcades. Over these is carried the celebrated Gallery, which communicated with the Palace, when it was inhabited by the Grand Dukes, by means of an arch, thrown over the intermediate street.

You enter it from the Court, by long flights of steps, by which you ascend to the upper story of the Building; and approach the long Corridors through a double Anti-Chamber, in the first Cube. of which are ten busts of the Medicean Princes. In the second is a Horse and a Wild Boar, both antiques; and over the

door

door is a Bust of Leopold, the first Grand Duke of the Austrian Family, who afterward ascended the Imperial throne.

In the first Wing of the Corridors are antique Statues, and Sarcophaguses, with Busts of almost all the Roman Emperors.

In the Second, which commands a pleasing view of the river, the principal objects, worth notice, are a Venus, sitting in a shell, and a Torso, or mutilated Statue, of exquisite workmanship.

In the Third you observe a Morpheus, in touch-stone; and a Copy of the Lao

coon.

The

The size and proportions of this famous Gallery, are far from answering the elevated idea generally entertained of its pre-eminence. It is both low and narrow for its length; and the MasterPieces of Painting and Sculpture with which it is lined, are degraded by an endless Row of uninteresting Portraits, indifferently painted, of all the Dynasties in Europe.

It now however shews to disadvantage, having been first stripped by the abdicated Grand Duke himself, of the celebrated Venus, and other objects esteemed most valuable (to place them in safety at Palermo) and afterward decimated, at the will of the Conqueror of Italy.

Yet

Yet a Suite of twenty Cabinets still includes immense numbers of ancient and modern Curiosities, suitably arranged.

The First of these contains, or did contain, for I did not allow myself time enough at Florence, on my way to Rome, to examine them all, the celebrated Bust of Alexander the Great, those of Junius Brutus, of Tullius Cicero; and a Statue of the Genio della Morté-not as the Scare-Crow of the Nurse or the School Mistress: but as the Angel of Death, that (in the figures of Gibbon) expects the Conqueror, in the field of victory.

In the Second Cabinet, among many other Objects, for I should tire myself

and