Among the strolling parties of monks and friars, cardinals and prelates,
Roman princesses and English peers, Spanish grandees and French
cavaliers which crowded the _Pincio_, towards the latter end of the
seventeenth century, there appeared two groups, which may have recalled
those of the Portico or the Academy, and which never failed to interest
and fix the attention of the beholders. The leader of one of these
singular parties was the venerable Niccolo Poussin! The air of antiquity
which breathed over all his works seemed to have infected even his
person and his features; and his cold, sedate, and passionless
countenance, his measured pace and sober deportment, spoke that
phlegmatic temperament and regulated feeling, which had led him to study
monuments rather than men, and to declare that the result of all his
experience was "to teach him to live well with all persons." Soberly
clad, and sagely accompanied by some learned antiquary or pious
churchman, and by a few of his deferential disciples, he gave out his
trite axioms in measured phrase and emphatic accent, lectured rather
than conversed, and appeared like one of the peripatetic teachers of the
last days of Athenian pedantry and pretension.
In striking contrast to these academic figures, which looked like their
own "grandsires cut in alabaster," appeared, unremittingly, on the
Pincio, after sun-set, a group of a different stamp and character, led
on by one who, in his flashing eye, mobile brow, and rapid movement, all
fire, feeling, and perception--was the very personification of genius
itself. This group consisted of Salvator Rosa, gallantly if not
splendidly habited, and a motley gathering of the learned and witty, the
gay and the grave, who surrounded him. He was constantly accompanied in
these walks on the Pincio by the most eminent virtuosi, poets,
musicians, and cavaliers in Rome; all anxious to draw him out on a
variety of subjects, when air, exercise, the desire of pleasing, and the
consciousness of success, had wound him up to his highest pitch of
excitement; while many who could not appreciate, and some who did not
approve, were still anxious to be seen in his train, merely that they
might have to boast "_nos quoque_."
From the Pincio, Salvator Rosa was generally accompanied home by the
most distinguished persons, both for talent and rank; and while the
frugal Poussin was lighting out some reverend prelate or antiquarian
with one sorry taper, Salvator, the prodigal Salvator, was passing the
evening in his elegant gallery, in the midst of princes, nobles, and men
of wit and science, where he made new claims on their admiration, both
as an artist and as an _improvisatore_; for till within a few years of
his death he continued to recite his own poetry, and sing his own
compositions to the harpsichord or lute.