Note 153 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

The palace here alluded to is fully described in a volume of “Travels through Sicily and Malta,” by P. Brydone, F.R.S., in 1770. He describes it as belonging to “the Prince of Palermo, a man of immense fortune, who has devoted his whole life to the study of monsters and chimeras, greater and more ridiculous than ever entered into the imagination of the wildest writers of romance and knight-errantry.” He tells us this palace was surrounded by an army of statues, “not one made to represent any object in nature. He has put the heads of men to the bodies of every sort of animal, and the heads of every other animal to the bodies of men. Sometimes he makes a compound of five or six animals that have no sort of resemblance in nature. He puts the head of a lion on the neck of a goose, the body of a lizard, the legs of a goat, the tail of a fox; on the back of this monster he puts another, if possible still more hideous, with five or six heads, and a bush of horns. There is no kind of horn in the world he has not collected, and his pleasure is to see them all flourishing upon the same head.” The interior of the house was decorated in the same monstrous style, and the description, unique of its kind, occupies several pages of Mr. Brydone’s book.—Ed.