Once more my life from its beginning to its end rose up before me,each scene like a spectre, like the harpies of the old fables rending me with tooth and claw.

The truth is, that my liquors bring a nest of friendly harpies about my house, who consume me.

Our courts of law are used by these harpies as engines of oppression; toil as he may the ryot is never free from debt.

Andrea del Sarto has placed harpies at the corner of the pedestal of the throne, in his famous Madonna di San Francesco (Florence Gal.),a gross fault in that otherwise grand and faultless picture; one of those desecrations of a religious theme which Andrea, as devoid of religious feeling as he was weak and dishonest, was in the habit of committing.

"I never saw such a set of harpies in my life.

But, in the seventeenth century, such an intimation would, it seems, have been an instant signal for the herd of scribblers to souse upon it, like the harpies on the feast of the Trojans, and leave its mangled relics too polluted for the use of genius: "Turba sonans praedam pedibus circumvolat uncis; Polluit ore dopes.