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The young plants keep growing up abundantly every day look at Bastianini, dead not ten years since but they are browsed down by the academies. I remember there came out a book many years ago with the title, "What becomes of all the clever little children?" I never saw the book, but the title is pertinent. Any man who can write, can draw to a not inconsiderable extent.
Mark's at Florence. The original teterrima causa belli has, I believe, disappeared from the Louvre Gallery. Poor Bastianini died shortly afterward, and it is due to his memory and undoubtedly great talent that it should be distinctly understood that from first to last he was no party to or profiter by the frauds to which his special talent had given rise.
Bastianini, then quite unknown and much in need of wherewithal to live, sold this bust as the work of his hands to a speculative dealer for, if I remember rightly, five hundred francs. The man who bought it carried it to a dealer in antiquities a very well-known man in Florence whose name I could give were it of any interest to do so and proposed to sell it to him for a large sum.
The bust sold to the Frenchman was easily identified with that which Bastianini had made, and which had been known to all artistic Florence, and the authorities at the Louvre were duly certified by many a loud-tongued informer that they had been gulled.
Together they stood in the little cells occupied once by Savonarola; looked at the strange, stern face which Bastianini chiseled so effectively; stood by the old wooden desk where Savonarola had written and read, saying very little to one another, but each conscious that the silence was one of perfect understanding and sympathy.
They ought, nevertheless, to be known, and I do not see any good reason why I should not tell them here. A young man at Florence of the name of Bastianini it must be at least ten years ago now, or perhaps more of very humble origin had shown a remarkable talent for modeling busts in terra-cotta.
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