"The screen of the high altar (the church at Ardara) is covered with portraits of apostles, saints, and martyrs, apparently a work of the thirteenth or early part of the fourteenth century; and, notwithstanding the neglect and damp, the colours and gildings are still bright and untarnished. Many of them are exquisitely finished, with all the fineness of an Albert Durer and Holbein, and will vie with the best specimens of the early masters in the gallery of Dresden, or the Pinakothek at Munich."
Valery, the mis-translator just mentioned, is in ecstacy in his notice of these works. He considers them worthy the perpetuity which the graver alone can give them, and considers how great their reputation would be had they found a Lanzi, a d'Agincour, or a Cicognara.
We have now travelled with our agreeable, well-informed author over much country--wild, and partially cultivated; have speculated with him upon all things that attracted attention by the way; and, though the roads have been somewhat rough, we have kept our tempers pretty well--no light accomplishment for fellow-travellers; and our disputes have been rather amusing than serious. We now enter with him the capital of Sardinia--Cagliari. We shall not follow him, however, through the modern town, though there can be no better cicerone; nor look in at the museum, fearful of long detention; not even to examine the Phoenician curiosities, or discuss the identity in character, with them, of some seals found in the bogs of Ireland; or to speculate with Sir George Staunton as to their Chinese origin, and how they unaccountably found themselves, some in an Irish bog and some in excavated earth in Sardinia, and from thence into the museum at Cagliari. We are content to visit some Roman antiquities, and read inscriptions probably of the age of the Antonines, or of an earlier period. The monuments are sepulchral: one is of a very interesting character. It is of some architectural pretensions--in honour of an exemplary wife, who, like Alcestis, is said to have died for her husband. The prose tale, were it in existence, might have told, perhaps, how Pomptilla--for that is her name--attended her husband in a sickness, caught his fever, and died, while he recovered. The inscriptions are many. Some have been made out tolerably well: they are in Latin and Greek. One, in Greek, has so much tenderness, that, deeming it quite worthy the melancholy cadence of verse, we have been tempted to substitute our own translation for that of Mr Tyndale in prose, with which we are not quite satisfied.