In his memoir Unforgotten Years (1938), the expatriate writer and aesthete Logan Pearsall Smith relates with exquisite irony how the name “Botticelli” first laid its enchantment upon a Boston audience:

While we were at Harvard, Edmund Gosse came to Boston [in 1884] to deliver the Lowell Lectures; my sister [later Mrs. Bernard Berenson] and many of the Harvard intellectuals went religiously to listen to the utterance of this English writer, whose name was familiar to us all. Of these lectures I have forgotten everything except one pregnant sentence, in which the name of Botticelli first echoed in our ears. “Botticelli,” the lecturer said, in that cultivated “English accent” which was music to us, “Botticelli,”—and with what unction he slowly reiterated those syllables!—“Botticelli, that name which is an open sesame to the most select, the most distinguished, the most exclusive circles of European culture.” The effect of these words upon us was magical. What longings it aroused in us, what delicious provincial aspirations for a world fairer than the world we lived in—for exquisite, remote, European things! It was the song the Syrens sang, it was the voice of the Muses that Thamyris heard among the Theban mountains, it was almost the voice that summoned St. Paul to a higher life as he journeyed to Damascus. . . . Among that audience, although my sister and I did not know him at the time, was the future critic, Bernard Berenson, who, he has told us since, went out at